


Returns

by taispeantas_laethuil



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoribull - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dorian as Inquisitor, Family Issues, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:40:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/pseuds/taispeantas_laethuil
Summary: The Inquisitor's father comes for an unexpected visit.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> With many, many thanks to the incredible [AniDragon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/AniDragon) for the art and putting up with my terrible communication skills, and to all the people who have listened to me scream up my own ass about this.

Dorian had been the Inquisitor for one year, one month and fourteen days, and had born the Mark for slightly more than double that amount of time when it happened.

He wouldn’t say it was an otherwise unremarkable day, up until that point, because the world was still ending and there was actually quite a lot to remark upon. But certainly, what there was wasn’t particularly catastrophic. They’d sealed up the last remaining rifts in the Hinterlands, cleared out the camps of two particularly odious Venatori of his acquaintance, killed the dragon, and things with the Bull were reaching the sort of equilibrium they’d had before the potential alliance with the Qun had gone down in flames.

Skyhold had been flying their flags in the pattern that meant there were guests there who needed to see him urgently, so they sent most of their group ahead and took advantage of the natural hot springs on the mountainside to bathe in before entering the keep itself.

“I miss public baths,” Dorian moaned as he sank down into the hot water.

“You must say that every time you bathe,” Blackwall complained, though it lacked some of his normal bite.

“It’s true all the time,” Dorian countered. “That’s just when it’s at the forefront of my mind. I miss being able to bathe on a daily basis and not have anyone think it strange.”

Blackwall snorted. “Not everyone has slaves to draw multiple baths for them.”

“Neither did I!” Dorian protested. Not that there hadn’t been slaves, but that hadn’t ever been part of their duties. “Plumbing, I had plumbing!”

“Pah!”

“The moment the bathhouses in Skyhold are renovated, you’ll see,” Dorian replied. “I’ll convert you to the ways of proper hygiene yet. I’ll convert you all!”

The Iron Bull laughed. Cole, who still had his hat on despite having clambered into the spring with them, peered at him in confusion.

“They should have called you the Herald of Hygiene,” Blackwall grumbled.

“Now, that is a mantel I would have been happy to take up,” Dorian replied.

Blackwall seemed content to allow him the final word, so Dorian closed his eyes and allowed himself a moment to relax as the heat and moisture soaked into him. Not nearly long enough of a moment, in his estimation, but enough to make him feel a little more refreshed, a little more relaxed.

It wouldn’t help him if the visitor with urgent business was Bann Shianni, of course: he didn’t seem capable of speaking with the woman in any way that left him feeling any higher than some kind of insect know for feasting upon its own feet. Ironically, she was also the potential visitor who he would be most sorry to leave waiting.

Probably, though, it was some two-bit Orlesian noble with trade connections they required and an overblown sense of importance they had to humor, so he resolved not to worry about it overmuch. He arranged his hair in some semblance of order in the reflection of Blackwall’s shield, shaved off the stubble, waxed his moustache and reapplied his kohl.

“Ready to meet your a-Dorian fans?” the Bull asked as they crossed the drawbridge into Skyhold.

Dorian groaned. “That was atrocious.”

He looked around, but couldn’t locate any obvious sign of an entourage. Which likely meant that it _was_ Bann Shianni who was looking for him, bugger it all. Hopefully Josephine had some progress to offer them both in that regard, because he was quickly becoming as tired of telling her that they hadn’t located her stolen people yet- much less found a way to get them home quickly- as she was of hearing it.

“Shall we all head up to the great hall together, make a proper entrance of it?” Dorian asked, after they’d dropped off their gear with Ser Morris and been assure that yes, everyone else had come back safely and no, they didn’t appear to be missing anything.

“You think it’s that Fereldan woman again, boss?” the Bull asked, as they all fell into step behind him.

“Is there a reason you would think it isn’t her?” Dorian asked. It was possible that the Bull had noticed something he’d missed.

“Nah,” the Bull replied. “I just want to know if we’re going watch you get yelled at by a redhead.”

“Well, you’re not either way,” Dorian said. “Provided it is her, I will greet Bann Shianni politely, invite her into my study, and then get yelled at away from prying eyes.”

“Way to crush a man’s dreams,” the Bull said.

“Tell you what,” Dorian replied. “Have some of that maraas-lok waiting for me when I emerge, and I’ll give you a blow-by-blow account.”

“Well my supply of maraas-lok is a little restricted these days.”

Dorian winced discreetly. Ah. Right. He’d made that decision, which you’d think would impart a little bit of awareness of the consequences, and yet…

“But I might be able to dig up something Antivan for you,” the Bull continued, before Dorian could assemble some facsimile of an apology to keep things smoothed over. “Or maybe some more of that Chasind Sack Mead.”

“I’ll place my faith in your abilities to find something sufficiently paint-stripping,” Dorian replied, and then the threshold to the great hall was upon them. He smiled in greeting at the various assembled nobles, begging off their requests for anything sort of interaction beyond the perfunctory with the long journey he’d just completed, and scanned the hall.

Bann Shianni was nowhere to be found. He saw no sign of her, heard no sign of her. Perhaps Josephine had already ushered her into her office? But no, there was Josephine, and with her was- striding past her was- coming towards him was-

Well. It wasn’t Bann Shianni. Bann Shianni would have been vastly more preferable.

“Are you feeling okay boss?” the Bull asked.

Dorian couldn’t answer. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t _breathe_.

“I can feel your hurt now,” Cole said in an undertone. “I can see it where it touches his. He’s the one who made your home not a home.”

“That’s a marvelous understatement,” Dorian heard himself reply, more than he actually decided to reply.

The man was upon them now, Josephine hot on his heels. “Inquisitor, I-”

“Have a guest with urgent business to discuss for me,” Dorian said. “Yes. I can see that.” He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. He couldn’t do this as though he was some kind of golem and there was someone else holding his control rod, and couldn’t lose his temper. Calm _and_ deliberate, that was the only way through this. “Why are you here, Father?”

* * *

 

Dorian had only been at the Temple of Sacred Ashes because of Felix. More specifically, he’d been there because of a meeting he’d had with his father. He’d been expecting Gereon to tell him of Felix’s long-anticipated death, and had been hopeful that the meeting itself was an indication that Dorian might be able to apologize for some of the rasher words he’d spoken when they’d parted. Perhaps Gereon might accept his condolences; perhaps they might raise a glass together in Felix’s memory, seeing as Dorian was unable to attend to his pyre.

But no: Felix was still alive and Gereon had evidentially graduated from chasing the least-likely applications of their work to chasing actual fairy tales told by the Southern Chantry. But when he asked Dorian to try to track down the Urn of Sacred Ashes, he’d also provided him with more money than Dorian had had access to in _years_ , and, in all honesty, fairy tales had to be less dangerous than time magic.

Dorian took the job, expecting that he would spend some time at the Temple of Sacred Ashes being told ‘no’ in increasingly impolite tones, and then would meet up with Gereon in Redcliffe. Possibly, Felix would be there. Possibly, he’d be able to spend some time with him again, to say goodbye.

Gereon hadn’t mentioned the Conclave. Dorian had thought the oversight was accidental, a sign of how deeply Gereon had buried himself in the search for a cure. That little illusion lingered for months, all the way to that long-delayed rendezvous in Redcliffe.

To put it more precisely, it had happened like this:

There was a rift blocking the gates to enter Redcliffe Village. That, in and of itself, was not particularly unusual for the Hinterlands. They’d found at least a dozen rifts thus far, and there were reports of several more. There had been one situated over the river that had been particularly tiresome- to the point of collapse, in his case. He’d had to be carried back to the Dennet farm, slung between Solas and Sera as his legs refused to cooperate, Solas doing something to ensure that the Mark wasn’t growing or changing, and Sera making comments about his fat arse.

This rift, the one blocking their way into the village, was no ordinary rift. It had been corrupted by time magic. By _his_ magic, or so he worried: what if, after all, he had had something specific to do with all of this, instead of simply being caught unawares by it like everyone else?

He’d been so preoccupied by the worry that he almost missed Felix. Felix was sitting outside the tavern, resting, and didn’t notice them until Dorian had called out to him. Then he _stood_. Felix _stood_ , and he _ran_ , and his arms closed tightly around Dorian with actual _strength_ , and he still had breath enough to exclaim “Dorian! You’re alive!”

“ _I’m_ alive?” Dorian repeated incredulously. Felix had not been this mobile when last they’d met. “Look at you, you’re…”

Felix took half a step back, not quite out of Dorian’s personal space: enough space to make Dorian wary of being overheard, but not so far as to make him drop his hand from Felix’s shoulder.

Dorian switched to Tevene. “Did he find a cure? I would have thought we’d have heard if he’d found a cure. We’re in _Fereldan_ , for pity’s sake. Everyone and their dog lost someone in the Blight, literally.”

“No, he hasn’t found a cure, he’s still- Maker, Dorian, the things he’s doing, it’s,” Felix dropped off, glancing nervously at his companions. “Are you sure they can’t understand Tevene?”

“No. Well,” Dorian paused to consider it. “Solas might have learned it in the Fade.”

Solas frowned. Whether that was because he had indeed learned to speak Tevene in the Fade, because he recognized his name, or because Sera was eyeing the nearest dungheap with a suspicious amount of glee was anyone’s guess.

Best not to chance it. “Where are my manners,” Dorian said, switching back to Trade. “Felix, this is Solas, an expert in the Breach, the Rifts, and all things Fade-related; Cassandra Pentaghast, former Seeker of Truth and some distant relation of mine; and Sera, who shoots extremely well and would probably try to shoot _me_ if I foisted a title with gravitas on her.” Solas and Cassandra nodded as he introduced them. Sera blew a raspberry, which he supposed amounted to much the same thing. “And this is Felix Alexius, heir to House Alexius of Minrathous, son of my former mentor, Magister Gereon of House Alexius, graduate of the University of Orlais with the highest of honors, and a very good friend.”

He glanced back at Felix as he finished the introductions, and noticed that he’d gone very pale.

“Felix?” He questioned, alarmed. Perhaps his seeming recovery was just that- seeming, incomplete, a façade. “Are you alright? Perhaps we should sit down.”

“Don’t fuss, Dorian,” Felix said on reflex. “And please, please tell me that you were not in the Temple when it exploded and just- just stuck around to help. Please.”

“Well,” Dorian said with a sigh. “Unfortunately, I cannot.” He pushed against the Fade a little, just enough to make the foreign energy of the Mark crackle around his hand.

Felix stared at him with unabashed horror. “Oh, Dorian. Oh no. Dorian, he’s going to kill you.”

“Who’s going to kill me? Gereon?” Dorian asked. If he hadn’t tried after that last argument, it was difficult to imagine him wanting to now, after everything that had happened.

“You don’t understand, you don’t know what he’s done,” Felix replied, sending a chill up his spine. “It’s- it’s bad, Dorian. It’s gotten worse since you left. He’s gotten so much worse, and I can’t stop him on my own.”

“I- what are you saying, exactly?” Dorian asked.

Felix’s eyes flicked over to the other Inquisition members before he replied. “I’m saying come into the tavern. Meet with the Grand Enchanter, and with Father. I don’t think he’ll do it out in the open, when he doesn’t know who you are, let alone that you were coming,” Felix said. “And when you’re done there, come meet me in the Chantry.”

They did go into the tavern, and they did meet with both Grand Enchanter Fiona and Gereon Alexius, for all the good it did them. It was exactly as Felix had said it would be: worse than he ever would have thought possible.

“What were you thinking?” he demanded. “No, no, I’m not speaking to you,” he added, when Fiona opened her mouth to defend herself. “You were faced with a difficult choice, and you made the one which seemed least likely to end in your death and the death of all your followers. I’m not sure why everyone’s so upset at you. But you!” He turned back to Gereon. “You put her in that position. You- you always spoke against the terrible treatment of foreign mages in the Imperium, you co-sponsored a bill that would allow them to gain citizenship with indenturing themselves. You know the statistics, you know the costs, you know _better_ , period!”

“Better than you, certainly,” Gereon replied, eyes narrowed.

If Felix had not feigned a fainting spell, the ensuing dispute would probably have gotten very ugly indeed. It was almost a relief to reach the Chantry and find it contained a demon-spilling Rift. He could use a good, straight-forward fight that did not involve anyone he’d once looked up to.

 “Felix should be along shortly,” Dorian said, once the Rift was closed. “It might take some time. He’s an only child, you know? His father likes to fuss.”

“He’s the ill friend you were looking for the Urn of Sacred Ashes for,” Cassandra pointed out. “You’ve mentioned him before, when you had yet to reach the Breach.”

“He’s ill?” Sera asked.

“He’s dying, as a matter of fact,” Dorian said, setting himself down wearily on one of the pews. “He looks better than when I saw him last, but that probably just means they’ve discovered a better way of controlling his symptoms, rather than an actual cure.”

“What’s he dying of?” Sera asked.

“Nothing curable, except perhaps through the much-vaunted power of Andraste,” Dorian told her.

Cassandra made the particularly disgusted noise that she reserved for blasphemy. “You are in a Chantry.”

“And I hail from a different Chantry which considers Andraste to not be of divine origin, and the worship of her to be itself heretical,” Dorian replied. “And yet, here will all sit, the statues aren’t weeping blood, there are no bolts from the blue, and there is a complete lack of any spontaneous combustion.”

Cassandra grunted again. “It would not kill you to show some respect.”

Dorian shrugged. “I think we can both agree that a lack of respect is not what keeps the Maker from turning His gaze upon us once more.”

“It certainly won’t turn His gaze any faster,” Cassandra replied.

“Hessarian’s mercy, are we discussing theology already?” Felix said. “If it gets down to nitty-gritty details, take my advice and just capitulate. He went to school with the Order of Argent, and he _liked_ it.”

“I didn’t like it,” Dorian protested. “It was, I’ll have you know, a highly unlikeable experience.”

“Are you honestly trying to tell me that you haven’t kept in contact with Father Gerontius?” Felix asked.

“I haven’t kept in contact with anyone from Tevinter, as well you know,” Dorian told him.

For a moment, there was a faint shadow of hurt on Felix’s face. “I just thought Father was hiding your letters from me.”

“I imagine he would have, if I’d been in a position to write them,” Dorian said, inclining his head towards his companions.

Felix got the message, and gave him the barest of nods in response. “It’s the very least of what he’d do, I expect.”

“What- what happened, Felix? This is- what has he done? And _why_?”

“Well. He got time travel to work, for one thing.”

Dorian felt a bit like he’d been stampeded by rampaging druffalo. “What?”

“The Inquisition got here before us, originally,” Felix explained. “You allied with Fiona’s mages. And then he went back in time and convinced her that without his help, the rebel mages were all doomed.”

“How, and- if he’d gotten it to work, Felix, neither one of us would be here,” Dorian pointed out. Dorian would have stayed with House Alexius if the darkspawn’s attack had been less successful, and Felix certainly would have no reason to travel any further south than Val Royeaux.

“This is fascinating, if true- and dangerous,” Solas pointed out.

“I know that, and he knows that. We knew that we when started our work on chronomancy,” Dorian said. “We agreed that it would be nice to develop the theory for time travel, but it should never be put into practice, it-”

“You’ve worked with time magic?” Cassandra demanded.

“Yes. Time _dilation_ , not time travel,” Dorian snapped. “The ability to create a stable field wherein the flow of time would be altered, so you can dig through rubble to rescue miners from a cave-in before they ran out of air, or grow seedlings to maturity in a matter of months instead of years, or get an injured man to a healer before he bled out, or to complete massive public works projects overnight when they wouldn’t inconvenience anyone, or any other number of helpful wonders. It was suppose to help people, not- Maker, that’s why the Rifts are so strange here. He’s distorted the flow of time itself, warped the fabric of the Veil even further.”

“The Rifts are why it works now, I think,” Felix said. “He can’t get it to go any farther back than the Conclave.”

“So he used it to indenture a bunch of Southern mages?” Dorian demanded.

“To get to them before you did, yes,” Felix said. “Everything he’s done, he’s done to get to you.”

“What would be the point of that, spite? You said he didn’t even know I was the one who survived the Conclave exploding!” Dorian pointed out.

“That’s why he did it. The people he was conferring with when you left? They’re Venatori.”

“I had guessed as much,” Dorian said sourly. It still stung, that Gereon would choose the very same people who had said that Felix’s very existence cheapened the Altus class over Dorian, who would have sooner burnt their faces off than tolerate the sentiment.

“Venatori?” Cassandra asked.

“One of the Imperium’s nastier cults,” Dorian explained. “Bent on recovering a glorious past which likely never even existed as they imagined it did, save for the part where Tevinter was spread over most of Thedas.”

“I don’t know why, but they want you- or at least, the Mark on your hand- very badly,” Felix added.

“And he’s working with them because he thinks they… have a cure?” Dorian asked. Even if it were true, the Venatori would never give it to Felix.

“It’s what they claim,” Felix said wearily. “I don’t know if he even believes it, so much as he needs the resources they give while he tries to figure out how to travel back before the Conclave exploded. And in order to keep getting those resources, he’s been asked to get you by whatever means necessary, including time travel.”

“ _Fasta vass_ , for all that effort I should have brought a fruit basket,” Dorian muttered.

They were silent, for a time.

“You know,” Dorian began, in as light as tone as he could muster up. “I was only at the Conclave because he sent me there.”

“I’d written to you,” Felix said. “I knew you’d help me deal with him, if I asked. You didn’t receive my letter, I take it?”

Dorian shook his head. “So, he intercepted it and then… wanted me out of the way,” Dorian said softly.

“It looks like it,” Felix replied, equally soft.

“So what now?” Cassandra asked.

“If he needs me- or, this,” Dorian said, holding up his hand. “Then he’ll have to get back in touch with us, invite us back to continue negotiations.”

“It’ll be a trap,” Solas pointed out.

“So? We spring the trap then,” Sera said.

“I’ll help, as much as I can,” Felix said.

And that was more or less exactly what they did, give or take a secret passage and some time travel.


	2. Chapter 2

“You’re my son,” Father replied, not without emotion.

Ah, so he was going to play it like that, then?

“That’s not what you said when last we spoke,” Dorian reminded him. Father was too professional to wince, but the lines around his eyes tightened fractionally.

“He wishes he hadn’t meant it,” Cole reported. Father’s eyes slid over to him, as though noticing him for the first time.

“Truly? That’s nice for him,” Dorian said. “I’m not sure I agree.”

Father sighed. “He’s always been like this, you know,” he remarked to Josephine.

“Is that how you arranged for this?” Dorian asked. “Played the long-suffering martyr trying to reconnect with your difficult child?”

Father didn’t reply, but did look very much like a long-suffering martyr trying to reconnect with his difficult child.

Someone approached from behind him- he half turned, careful to keep his father in his sight, as she came up to them. “Inquisitor.”

“Now’s not a good time, Mother Giselle,” Dorian said, though he half-hoped that she had some pressing matter that would drag him away from here.

“My Lord Inquisitor,” she pressed. “Your father contacted me some time ago to arrange a meeting.”

Ah. “Did he?” Dorian asked.

“He wished to meet in some other location,” Mother Giselle continued. “We convinced him that it would be better if he came here.”

“We?” Dorian asked, turning to Josephine. It was surprising, how much that hurt.

Josephine, being Josephine, didn’t so much as flinch. “We,” she confirmed quietly.

“Your father told us that your estrangement was not without cause,” Mother Giselle continued. “And that he wanted to make amends.”

Dorian snorted.

“Dorian, I-” His father began.

Dorian was not inclined to let him finish. “You did what, exactly? Insinuated that we parted ways over some political tiff? A difference of opinion about my career path?” He scoffed. “ _Not without cause_.”

“Perhaps we should take this into your office, Inquisitor,” Josephine suggested.

“Did I not make it clear that I wanted no contact with my family, much less to lay eyes on my father?” Dorian hissed.

“You did,” Josephine said carefully. “But you did not state why. You certainly did not insinuate that it was anything more serious than a difference in opinion, as profound as that difference might be. And with the diplomatic situation with Tevinter being what it is-”

“Didn’t I?” Dorian replied skipping past the pragmatics for now. “Well then, I was remiss. Perhaps you should know why. Perhaps everyone should know why!” He turned back to his father. “You claim to want to make amends? Well, I want a witness. Let’s have at it, see if we can’t meet in the middle.”

Father looked upset. It was galling, how guilty Dorian felt about putting that expression there.

“There’s no need for this,” he pleaded. “Let’s go into your office, Dorian. This display is uncalled for.”

It was even more galling, how much Dorian wanted to acquiesce. Dorian clung to the anger, and the way his father’s eyes darted around to the visitors listening avidly, the way the Bull had come up behind him and was now looming imposingly, obviously there to back him up.

“It is called for,” Dorian reminded him. “You called for it. But by all means, let’s hear how mystified you are by my anger.”

“This isn’t what I wanted,” Father said.

“I am never what you wanted,” Dorian retorted. “Or have you forgotten?”

There was a resounding silence in the great hall. Even the workers paused in the renovating to listen. Josephine’s mouth was slightly open as she tried to formulate her question, so Dorian beat her to it.

“I prefer the company of men.”

Father looked about ready to have a heart attack.

“I don’t understand,” Mother Giselle said, when Josephine did not.

“The company of men, as in sex,” Dorian elaborated. “Surely you’re familiar with the concept.”

Mother Giselle shrugged, still obviously confused. “The concept, yes. Personally I have never understood the carnal appeal of men.”

Dorian blinked. And then he laughed. It echoed gratingly around the hall.

“Is this really about who you sleep with?” Blackwall demanded.

“Not at all!” Dorian told him, his shoulders still shaking with something like mirth. “It’s about the impossible standard every person in Tevinter strives to attain, the constant struggle to breed for the perfect mage, the perfect body, the perfect mind. Every flaw, every aberration from that standard is considered deviant and shameful. It must be hidden.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his father flinch, so he wheeled around to face him head on, and pressed. “It must be denied. It must contained. It must be _corrected_ , if all possible. Isn’t that right, Father?”

“I only wanted what was best for you,” Father said.

“You wanted what was best for you! For your fucking legacy! Anything for that!” He looked around, at the anxiously guarded expressions on the faces of Mother Giselle and Josephine, at the open stares of the assembled visitors, at the dawning horror on the Bull’s face, and found no one in particular he felt safe in addressing.

So he turned back to his father, who at least had the distinction of being the most familiar, and the most at fault. “He’s the one who taught me to hate blood magic. The last resort of the weak mind, he said. And what was the first thing you tried when your precious heir refused to play pretend for the rest of his life? You tried to change me!”

The realization of what had happened seemed to travel out in waves. Josephine clapped her hand over her mouth. Mother Giselle swayed dangerously, until Cole appeared to support her. A swell of gasping and horrified muttering engulfed the visitors, and reverberating back to Dorian, who was appalled to discover that he was very nearly crying.

Yelling was one thing; the public humiliation that had caused his father was actually gratifying at a base level Dorian generally tried to ignore these days. Allowing his father to bring him to tears in front of all these people was another matter entirely.

“I’m tired,” he said simply, and forced himself to walk at a stately pace out of the hall.

His father tried to call out after him, but he didn’t manage more than a syllable before the Bull cut him off. “I think you’ve said enough.”

“I couldn’t agree more!” Dorian yelled back without turning around, and then minute he was safely out of view of the great hall he ran all the way back to his quarters, taking the steps two at a time.

* * *

 

Tevinter was a problem right from the start.

It was not merely the matter that Dorian was of Tevinter, though that certainly was at the crux of the matter early on. That knowledge had been omnipresent in Haven. He’d heard it from Cassandra, and Solas, and Varric, as they battled their way towards the Breach that first time. He’d overheard it afterwards, in Haven, as he stumbled around in an attempt to get his bearings: _I mean, Hessarian was a ‘vint, yeah? I mean, he was a bleeding Archon, there’s not a ‘Vintier vintage than that._

Would Chancellor Roderick have been so insistent of his guilt without it? It was impossible to say, and given the evident lack of power he had to enforce his beliefs, moot point anyway. This Herald of Andraste business was much more alarming.

“The only way I could be a more inappropriate choice for your Chantry would be if I were seven feet tall and had horns,” he protested.

Leliana looked at him, assessing. Cassandra opened her mouth to argue, but Josephine beat her to the punch with shrug. “They say the Maker works in mysterious ways.”

“We have made sure that they say it more often now,” Leliana told him.

So it had been all decided for him, then. While he’d been unconscious, a carefully crafted image of the Herald of Andraste, Tevinter mage, had been prepared and packaged and now that he was awake Dorian was expected to play the part.

Well, fuck that.

His complete lack of desire to play the role set out for him added a vehemence, a viciousness to his denials that all his native doubts and theological differences alone could not achieve. He was not the Herald of Andraste, the Imperial Chantry didn’t even believe Andraste capable of sending heralds, and he was very much from the Imperium, thank you kindly.

Kind gratitude was not something Dorian was very adept at, but thankfully, sarcasm was.

“So you are the one they are calling the Herald of Andraste?” Mother Giselle asked, once they had finally fought their way over to the refugee camp she was running.

“Incorrectly, not that my corrections seem to amount to much,” Dorian replied.

Mother Giselle smiled. “We often have little choice in our destiny, I am sad to say.”

“I’m sad to say that I often find platitudes to be condescending and unhelpful,” Dorian retorted. “Shall we? I presume you called us down here for a reason.”

Mother Giselle raised an eyebrow, but followed him anyway.

“I know of the Chantry’s denouncement,” Mother Giselle said. “And I am familiar with those behind it. I won’t lie to you: some of them are grandstanding, hoping to increase their chances of becoming the new divine. Some are merely terrified. So many good people, senselessly taken from us…”

“Pardon me for saying so, but aren’t you with the Chantry?” Dorian pointed out.

“With no Divine, we are each left to our own conscience,” Mother Giselle replied. “And mine tells me this: you should go to them. Convince that you are no demon to be feared. They have heard only frightful tales of you. Give them something else to believe.”

“I don’t think they’d find me much more appealing in reality than I am in tales,” Dorian pointed out dryly.

“Why?” Mother Giselle challenged. “Because you are a mage?”

“From Tevinter,” Dorian said flatly.

It was obvious from the expression on her face that this was something she’d heard, but then dismissed as a rumor. Dorian was, all things considered, rather relieved.

“You understand the impossibility of it,” he continued. “My Chantry does not consider Andraste to be capable of sending Heralds. Your Chantry does not consider mages to be particularly worthy vessels for anything, as I understand it. Neither Chantry recognizes the other as legitimate. It is completely impossible, don’t you think?”

“I think,” Mother Giselle said slowly. “That I cannot presume to know the Maker’s intentions, for any of us. I think that you do not have to convince every Mother in the Chantry that you are holy, or even that you are not evil. Their power is in their unity. Sow doubt, and their disharmony will do your work for you.”

Dorian sighed. A part of him had hoped that Mother Giselle would reject him outright, and give him a good excuse to drop this Herald business once and for all. Alas, it was not to be.

“I suppose I should thank you, for doing this,” Dorian said. “Particularly since I suppose you were hoping for someone you could believe in.”

“I cannot presume to know the Maker’s intentions,” Mother Giselle repeated. “I can only hope that you are equal to the task set before you. Hope is what we need now.”

Dorian could not help but get the impression that he’d passed some sort of test when he returned from the Hinterlands with Mother Giselle. That the woman was too much of a busybody to ever not come along with him, and had probably made up her mind the moment she first heard of the Inquisition did not seem to matter. It seemed to an outsider that he’d persuaded a Chantry Mother- a very well-respected Chantry Mother who, it must be said, did appear to have a well-deserved reputation for doing good works- to join a heretical Inquisition, while the main body of the Chantry fractured even further. That’s what mattered: one more tale to ascribe to the divine right of the Herald of Andraste.

At the rate they were attempting to go, some Fereldan will have written some kind of awful ballad about his faithful mabari companion before his ashes even had a chance to cool.

But there were more important matters at hand: a trip to Val Royeaux to speak with the Chantry there, and hopefully bring in a few more people, gain a little more support, or failing that, sow a lot more discord. In the midst of preparations for that, Josephine took him aside.

“People have questions,” she said. “About what kind of place Tevinter really is.”

“Tell them that we generally save turning into abominations for the Wednesday orgies and that drinking baby’s blood with dinner has been passé for well over a century,” Dorian replied. “Everyone knows that baby’s blood is a breakfast beverage.”

Josephine was unimpressed with his sparkling wit. “I didn’t ask you so that I could get your opinion on other people’s opinions.”

“Didn’t you? Doesn’t the depth of my disdain give you a thousand ideas of how I’m to be better managed?”

“I would prefer to be managing public opinion on your behalf, than managing you for public opinion,” Josephine replied.

Dorian would believe that she wanted him to believe that, and that she would even go out of her way to ensure that he _could_ believe it. But politics were a dull grind, particularly when one was restrained to the role of an empty figurehead, whether that was as the Herald of Andraste or the Legacy of House Pavus. There were very few tricks that he didn’t know, and hadn’t previously outwitted.

“Why did you leave Tevinter? Perhaps we could start there,” she suggested gently.

“I intend to return, someday,” Dorian said with a snort. “We may as well start there instead.”

There was a way Southerners talked about Tevinter tended to go a certain way, when it wasn’t some mystical land of evil magisters to be used to frighten young mages into compliance. The prevailing attitude was that you be from Tevinter _previously_ \- and you had to at least want to leave the country of your birth, even if you couldn’t scrape together the means. Otherwise you clearly were one of the evil magisters who ran the place, and had no morality to speak of. What good, decent person could ever want to live in their own homeland, flawed though it may be? That was why the Dales remained unoccupied after their conquest in protest. Why, when Halamshiral was purged, Orlesians packed their things and left in droves! Whenever Nevarra attempted to expand and laid siege to a city on their borders, their cities emptied of people who could not stand to belong to a nation which did such a thing. At the first whiff of abuse of power in the Circle, the citizenry of Kirkwall all packed up and moved to neighboring Marches. Anyone who was any kind of morally upstanding citizen of means lived out of landships and floated from nation to nation, leaving the business of government to the corrupt and vile, in order to spare their blushing buttcheeks the shame of associating with such people.

Oh, wait. No they didn’t. Because that would be idiotic in the extreme.

Josephine, sadly, did not rise to his bait and provide him with an opportunity to say as much. “And what will you do when you return?”

“Change things,” Dorian replied. “Or, rather, try and restore them. We put a lot of stock into being a meritocracy, you know, at least in theory. The idea is that anyone with sufficient talent should be able to rise in status, regardless of their origins.”

“Magical talent, you mean,” Josephine asked.

“Yes. Which conveniently enough tends to run in families. Not that it’s a sure thing, of course, even when you take wild rice sowing into account. A mage might pop up anywhere, and of course two mages could always produce a non-mage child. Which is when things all start to fall apart. A mage born into a farming village can have their preliminary education paid for by the state, but would need a patron to advance further- and patrons can be difficult to come by, especially if you’re not outstandingly powerful. Most of the time Laetans find themselves granted access to higher education only on the condition that they perform their patron’s house’s mandatory military service for them, and for quite a lot of them, that proves fatal. And then, on the other side of things, if an Altus child doesn’t manifest magic, then they’re in trouble. At best, they tend to be disowned and given over to the Templar Order. At worst, they tend to suffer dreadful accidents, which are also often fatal.” He thought of Felix then, who was quite possibly the best person he’d ever known, and found it very difficult to so much as light a candle under his own power. “Between you and me, I find the emphasis my home places on magical talent to be a bit much,” he added.

“Truly,” Josephine said, perking up at the mention of something she could use to make him palatable.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think your way of doing things is ghastly, but- there are other talents which certainly deserve recognition.” And they weren’t recognized as such in Tevinter. Felix had had to travel to _Orlais_ to get his degree for pity’s sake. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long trip ahead of me, so-”

“You didn’t mention slavery.”

No, he hadn’t. He was rather hoping to not mention it, as a matter of fact. He’d been asked if he owned slaves enough times to know that the truth- he owned none, but his family did, and treated them well- wasn’t going to make people listen to him.

That, and it had stopped being entirely truthful once blood magic had entered the picture. He had less than zero desire to share that particular tale with anyone, however.

“Slaves have it even worse than your average peasant when it comes to being a mage. Legally, a slave who manifests magic should be freed along with their closest relations, but there have been fewer and fewer cases of that as time goes on,” he hedged.

It was left at that for the time being. When Dorian returned from Val Royeaux, along with Sera (thank the Maker for Sera) and Vivienne (thank the Maker Vivienne was at least nominally on their side) to join their ranks, there were two Tevinter-related things wait for him. The first was a book, some dry tome about slavery that Dorian rolled his eyes at and then pointedly left unopened on his nightstand for Leliana’s spies to see.

The other was a request for positive proof of identification from the Tevinter Imperium’s embassy in Denerim.

“There’s only one thing they’ll accept,” Dorian said. “A sworn affidavit, sealed with my birthright.”

They could procure the affidavit right now, but the seal would be trickier.

“You have family,” Josephine pointed out. “If we wrote to them-”

“The less contact my family has with the Inquisition the better for all parties involved,” Dorian said shortly.

“But if they can help-”

“My family and I are no longer on speaking terms,” Dorian said flatly.

“Why?” Cullen asked.

“By mutual agreement,” Dorian said. It was almost true. Dorian’s family could not stand him so much that they’d tried to change him, which Dorian in turn could not stand for. It was quite mutual, even if they’d never quite discussed it as such. “I do not care for their choices, nor they for mine.”

“But if we cannot prove your identity, then-”

“I sold my birthright,” Dorian admitted. The words came out in a rush, as old shame and old defiance that had been festering somewhere inside burst forth. “I sold it a year ago, well before the Conclave, so it wasn’t destroyed with all my other personal effects. I sold it to a rather irritating little man named Ponchard. He has a shop in Val Royeaux. I have no doubt he’ll try to extort whatever funds he can from whatever agents you send to him, but it should be a simple enough thing to retrieve it.”

It was not a simple thing to retrieve it apparently, as Dorian discovered when he returned from yet another jaunt into the Hinterlands, ready to requisition troops to build watchtowers for Mr. Dennet’s farm and with a surly sort of Grey Warden in tow.

“What do you mean he wants ‘alternative compensation’? What kind of alternative compensation?” he cried, sneering down at the missive in disgust. “If he thinks he’s going to end up with a Herald of Andraste endorsed shop as a result of this he’s got another thing coming.”

“He didn’t strike my agent as a particularly brave man,” Leliana mused. “It would be a simple thing to persuade him to give it up, I think.”

“It would also be simple to give him what he wants… and make certain that all knew he earned his place through us,” Josephine chimed in.

“Bloody Orlesians,” Cullen muttered, which, while almost hilariously Fereldan, was utterly unhelpful.

In the end he’d decided to let Josephine handle it, and put it out of his mind. There were a thousand other things which required his attention. They had yet to reach Redcliffe, some of their soldiers had been captured in a place known as the Fallow Mire, the Breach was still there and even once they’d managed to deal with that the question remained: what had caused it in the first place? What had nearly destroyed the world?

Tevinter, apparently. It was them all along.


	3. Chapter 3

He scrubbed off his make-up before he let himself cry. There wasn’t very much of it, but the kohl alone would be enough to make it worse. The last thing he wanted was to look in the mirror when he was done and see the same face that had stared back out at him from storefront windows as he fled the Pavus Estate in Qarinus.

Instead, once he had cried himself dry and raised his head back up the face that he saw was old. Well, _older_ , he should say: lines around the eyes that hadn’t disappeared even with the puffiness, more grey hairs than any sane man should wish to pluck out.

“You should line your eyes with silver when we go to Halamshiral,” Vivienne had told when last he had tea with her. “Highlight that distinguished air of yours.”

Dorian hadn’t quite known whether she meant it more as an insult or as a compliment. Quite possibly, she meant it to make him squirm through his attempts to interpret her words. He only thought of them now because they made a ready distraction from the truth: it might have been better if he’d looked at kohl running down his face and been transported back to that time. Now all he could see was the evidence that seven years had passed since that moment, seven long and eventful years.

He should be past this by now.

He got up from the washroom only so he could move to the little wine rack. He was contemplating whether he should pretend to give a shit and open up a bottle of Antivan brandy, or if he should dispense with all pretense, pull a Grey Warden, and mix everything together to chug in one go.

That’s when he heard a knock on the door.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Dorian yelled. “I’ve had a very trying day, unless the world’s ending the Inquisitor is out, come back tomorrow!”

There was another knock.

“Is it more ending than usual?” Dorian demanded. It was possible, he supposed, that Corypheus had coincidentally chosen to launch some kind of attack on the same day his father returned to his life. Or that it wasn’t a coincidence at all. What he knew of his father’s capabilities was frightening, in that all he knew was that anything was possible.

Gereon Alexius had turned to the Venatori to save his son. What might Halward Pavus have done to bring his heir in line? He’d already tried blood magic. How far would he go…

“ _Fasta vass_ , I’m coming!” Dorian said, already heading for the stairs.

He was halfway down them when he heard the Bull say. “It’s only me, Dorian.”

Dorian opened the door to find him standing there, a bottle in one and a picnic basket in another.

“Sorry about that,” the Bull said. “I needed a free hand to knock with, so I kind of was holding the picnic basket with my mouth.”

Dorian stared.

“I brought maraas-lok,” the Bull added, thrusting the bottle out towards him.

Dorian took it. “I didn’t always like you, you know,” Dorian said, bewildered by the poor taste he’d displayed as recently as six months ago. “In fact, I was quite determined to _dislike_ you.”

“No, really? I never would have guessed,” the Bull replied with a snort. “Can I come in?”

“Of course,” Dorian said. He stepped aside to let the Bull in, and locked the door behind him.

They ended up on the balcony. The Bull spread out the contents of his picnic basket while Dorian went to fetch several bottles of alcohol for expediency’s sake.

“Do you want to talk about it?” the Bull asked him.

“After that little display? I think I’ll have to,” Dorian pointed out. “Maker only knows what the vultures think of me now.”

“Do you want to try talking to me about it first?” the Bull asked, before hastily adding “It’s okay if you don’t. I know family stuff can be rough.”

“Qunari don’t have families,” Dorian mused. “I suppose this is why. One conversation with my father, and I’m rendered absolutely useless as a leader.”

“Hey,” the Bull said. “You’re allowed this. You don’t have to be the Inquisitor all the time.”

There was nothing Dorian could say to that which wouldn’t be unforgivably vitriolic, so he took a drink instead, gagging a little before the alcohol numbed his throat. He would be in a lot of pain tomorrow morning, but if he was lucky, he would get to a point where he couldn’t feel it at all tonight first.

He looked out at the sky, which had passed through twilight and was now becoming a proper night sky, a plethora of stars growing ever more visible as the Illitherian moon was still hidden behind the mountains. It wasn’t quite spring yet, and the night would be a long one.

“He’s not a bad person, really, my father,” Dorian said. “He’s done a lot of things that made me proud to be his son, that do make me proud. He was just- desperate, I suppose.”

The Bull looked skeptical, but said nothing.

“I was a difficult child, growing up, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to hear,” Dorian said.

“Whoa, let me stop you right there,” the Bull said. “I don’t care how difficult you were, it doesn’t justify blood magic.”

“You don’t understand. He was proud of it. I was kicked out of my first Circle at the age of nine, did you know that?” Dorian asked. The Bull probably did know that. It had probably been in the dossier the Ben-Hassrath had compiled on him. He doubted disciplinary records for schoolboys had much in the way of security. “It was for fighting, of course. One of the other students had challenged me to a duel, I accepted, and nearly burned his arm clean off. There was a lecture on control and proportional responses for the headmaster’s benefit, and then the moment we were safely away on the carriage he turned to me and said he was proud. The other boy was fifteen years old, you see: an Altus from a lineage as old and powerful as my own, with five years worth of Circle tutelage under his belt, and I’d defeated him handily. It spoke highly of my abilities, my power. My breeding.”

“It spoke highly of him, that his kid was capable of that,” the Bull said.

“Precisely.”

“So, what changed?”

“I did. Or rather, I turned sixteen and shortly thereafter discovered men, and sex, and the delights of having both of those in combination,” Dorian told him. “There’s nothing to be proud of when it comes to getting expelled for being discovered with your lips wrapped around some Laetan’s cock in amongst the Chantry pews.”

“I don’t know, that sounds pretty ballsy to me,” the Bull said.

Dorian laughed. “Highly inappropriate, was the phrase used. He wouldn’t even look at me afterwards, and it wasn’t simple embarrassment. If I’d been caught with a girl… well, he still wouldn’t have approved of a Laetan, but I definitely would have gotten a different lecture. I tried to keep that out of the Circles, from then on, which only meant that I ended up spending more and more time skipping class to carousing around. Things fell apart, and then kept falling.”

Dorian took another swing of maraas-lok. It had more or less stopped burning. The Bull waited, patiently, and shifted the basket of rolls towards Dorian a little. Dorian ignored the gesture.

“I hit bottom. Multiple times. I got kicked out of every Circle in Tevinter, went through tutors like wine at a bacchanalia, and ended up with the Order of Argent, a last-ditch sort of reform school, run more like the Southern Circles than anything else. I hated it. I hated almost everything about it. So I left, ran away, spent the next three months living more or less out of various brothels, until Gereon found me. And then when _that_ fell apart, I was well on my way to returning to that state when my father had me kidnapped for my own alleged good.”

“When you say kidnapped…” the Bull didn’t quite ask.

“I mean, he hired some thugs to slaughter their way through the guards of the house I was staying at, hit me over the head, and drag me back home to Qarinus to await my nuptials,” Dorian explained. “A quite literal kidnapping.”

“And also murder,” the Bull added.

“That too,” Dorian agreed. He laughed, less because it was funny and more because he was tired of crying.

He hadn’t ever actually cried over that part, come to think of it. He’d railed against senseless waste of it, while he was being kept prisoner in his own childhood home; he’d cried over Rilienus, cried over the unfairness of it all, but hadn’t actually cried over the guard’s deaths.

It was so easy, in Tevinter, to forget that people were people: that they had family and friends and dreams and desires all their own, instead of simply being useful containers of blood.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have been taken by surprise by the ritual,” Dorian said. “But it seemed like such a large leap from murderer to maleficar, that I…”

Dorian cut himself off with another sip of maraas-lok. He reached over the dinner rolls to the grapes and popped one into his mouth.

“Look, your father’s an asshole,” the Bull said.

“No, he’s really not,” Dorian said. It would be easier if it was that way. It would be easier to dismiss him if he’d always behaved abominably, rather than being the person who had given Dorian the framework to recognize such behaviors and call them out for what they were.

“He kidnapped you and tried to perform blood magic on you,” the Bull reminded him. “That makes him an asshole.”

“When it comes to me, perhaps,” Dorian conceded. “But he’s not like that generally. He wasn’t even always like that to me.”

“He wasn’t like that to you until you stopped giving him what he wanted, you mean,” the Bull pointed out. “That’s not right, Dorian, that’s not how it should be.”

“What would you know of it? Qunari don’t have families,” Dorian repeated. It wasn’t as though he didn’t understand what the Bull was trying to say, but it was easier to dismiss it than to dismiss the memory of his father’s pride. It was better to think that he had been loved for himself once, and not merely as suitable heir for his father.

“Well, I was a really shitty Qunari,” the Bull replied.

For a moment after that, they were silent but for the occasional swish of maraas-lok as they passed the bottle back and forth between them. Satina had risen, the light from both moons reflecting off the snow well enough that Dorian could see as clearly as he could during the height of day. Off in the distance, an owl dived for some unseen vermin, and then pulled up again, having missed its kill.

“Can I ask you something?” the Bull asked. “You don’t have to answer.”

“By all means,” Dorian replied.

“Did you ever consider letting him change you?”

“Via blood magic?” Dorian drawled. “No.”

“Did you ever want to be different, then? More like what was expected of you.”

“Have I done anything to give you the impression that I wished to be as expected? If so, I apologize.”

“Come on, it’s a serious question.”

“Which you told me I did not have to answer.”

That halted conversation for a moment.

“The problem was never anything as base as my preference to men,” Dorian said after another fortifying drink. “But rather my refusal to hide it. When I was younger, it galled that I couldn’t engage in an exchange of blowjobs in some closet or another without fear of blackmail whereas my peers could brag openly about their conquests. I hated that, rebelled against it, even if the fear of disappointing my father made me behave rather more conventionally than I otherwise might have done. And then… have I ever told you much about my time with the Alexius family?”

“You’ve told me about Felix,” the Bull replied. “He was a great guy, from the sound of things.”

“Yes, and a terrible mage, too,” Dorian said, causing the Bull to frown. “In any other family he would have likely suffered a quiet accident in his childhood and spared his House the indignity. His grandfather had one arranged for him, or so the rumors always said, but Felix’s mother put her foot down so hard it broke his neck. It was- she and Gereon were a love match, and they were determined that Felix marry for love as well. He could hardly do otherwise, in his position, but even without that…”

He took another sip of maraas-lok, so numb on it that it might as well have been water. His fingertips tingled as he set the bottle back down.

“You’re not expect to love your spouse, in Tevinter, or even like them overly much. Having too much affection for one’s spouse is considered something of a defect, actually. But Gereon and Livia loved one another, and they loved Felix, who they also protected from pettiness of the rest of the Altus class, and who would write to me about gossip from Orlais: which chevaliers had taken paramours from amongst the commoners, rumors of the Empress’ mistresses, who was having any sort of relations with whom, gender being no object whatsoever. It was eye-opening. It made see a different way of being, made me want it, or as much of it as I could get. If Gereon and Livia could marry for love, could expect their son to do the same, then why shouldn’t I _not_ marry for love? And _that_ my father could not abide by. The rest could be swept aside as youthful indiscretions, but to plan a future where I had no wife and produced no issue? That was unforgivable, in his eyes.”

“I’d ask if you ever felt like cutting out the part of you that cared,” the Bull said. “But I can’t really picture you not caring.”

“Oh, that I definitely did try,” Dorian said. “Or, well. I tried drowning it. Smothering it. Wrapping it up in tissue paper and mothballs and stuffing it in the attic to slowly decay. It didn’t work. I could never convince myself that it was right, once the alternative had introduced itself.”

It was a strange thing, in a way, to have one’s views so strongly altered- or, rather, have one’s foundations prove to be crumbling facades. He had never questioned the value of magic over all else until he’d befriended Felix. He’d never thought to question slavery until after he’d arrived here, down South, and Leliana had rather beaten him over the head about it. But here he sat with all that knowledge, as uncomfortable as it was.

And somewhere else, there sat his father, who would have scoffed at the thought that anything could be done with it. Who had scoffed at it, as a matter of fact. ‘Be reasonable, Dorian,’ he might say, had said. ‘You must know that you can’t carry on this way.’

“You know, it’s funny. For a time there, I had this fantasy, you know? Things with my father would find some manner of resolution, I would continue to work closely with House Alexius and build my career in academia, perhaps even become the Magister for the Minrathous Circle. I would have my work, my best friend, my mentor, some measure of peace with my family, and- and then I would find a someone to have as well. A partner, a man whom I had chosen, and who had chosen me in return. It all sounds so naïve now.”

“Not to me, it doesn’t,” the Bull said softly.

 Dorian declined to reply and took another swig of maraas-lok, soused enough not to bother trying to drink it slowly. Felix was dead, Gereon was working now only under close guard, and his father…

Maker, he didn’t want to think about his father. He didn’t want to think at all.

He was going to have to, however. After that little display… how many people would turn from the Inquisition, now that the Herald of Andraste had been seen driven nearly to tears by a visit from his father, or knew that he’d come from a less shining example of what Tevinter could be than Josephine had presented? What would they say, knowing he was the son of a maleficar, that he’d very nearly underwent the sort of horrendous ritual all Southerners seemed to fear? He didn’t think the knowledge of his preferences would cause much strain except amongst those unmarried, ambitious women, but what if he was wrong?

“ _Vishante kaffas_ ,” he groaned, looking mournfully at the maraas-lok bottle as he handed it back to the Bull. He should probably behave responsibly and stop drinking, so that he had some chance of being useful in morning.

“What?” the Bull asked, before necking some maraas-lok from the bottle. Dorian watched his throat working, and waited until he was finished before speaking.

“Everyone knows now, Bull.” That wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but it was out now, and there was no taking it back.

“Don’t worry about it tonight,” the Bull said, offering the bottle to him again. When Dorian didn’t take it, he put it down next to him. “Don’t be the Inquisitor tonight. You eat, you drink, you be as angry and messy as you have to be.”

“And you?” Dorian asked. He tried to say it imperiously, but couldn’t quite stop the uncertainty from creeping into his voice.

“I’ll take care of you,” the Bull said simply, as though he could never have given any other answer. “Make sure you’re ready to go back to fighting the good fight tomorrow.”

Normally, Dorian would be able to come up with something flippant to say to that. But he had reached the level of drunkenness where his emotions would run unchecked, and a damning mixture of gratitude and fondness swelled up and choked the sarcasm out of him.

“Thank you,” he said, and he drank.

* * *

 

To say that things had not always been easy between the Bull and Dorian was understating the matter.

It had started with Krem, of course. Krem had come up to speak with him shortly after they returned from Val Royeaux for the first time, and upon hearing the accent Dorian had mistaken him for an underling of Gereon’s.

“I suppose you’re an envoy of House Alexius,” he said, and then before Krem could respond he rolled on straight to the point. “Is Felix still alive?”

“I… don’t know that, sorry,” Krem apologized. “I don’t work for House Alexius. Never heard of them, actually.”

“Ah.” The only other Tevinters Dorian could think of who might want to send him any kind of message was Mae, who was far more likely to want to use the Merchant Guild’s messaging system, and his family, and _that_ was not destined to end well. “Well, nothing personal, but if you work for House Pavus I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Krem laughed. “You’ve got the boot on the wrong foot, Altus. I’m Cremissius Aclassi, lieutenant to the Bull’s Chargers. We’re a group of mercenaries, and our chief’s just about as far away from being Tevinter as you can get.”

Somehow or another, that left Dorian with the impression that the Chargers’ leader was Fereldan, perhaps one of those Avvar barbarians he heard so much about with a name like the Bull. Someone _geographically_ from as far away from Tevinter as you could get.

Imagine his surprise, then, when he arrived on the Storm Coast only to discover that the Bull was a Qunari. Imagine his surprise, then, when it got _worse_.

“Have you ever heard of the Ben-Hassrath?” the Qunari asked.

“I’m Tevinter,” Dorian repeated, because he didn’t seem to have gotten that the first time around. “From Qarinus.”

The Bull paused. Dorian wondered if he was reliving raids he might have conducted on Qarinus. Some of those raids had even been against the Pavus Estate itself.

“So, you’ve heard of us, then,” the Bull said easily, as though the pause had never been. “Good. Then you know what an asset we could be.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that the Ben-Hassrath would willingly help out a Tevinter,” Dorian retorted.

“Eh, ‘Vints don’t look so bad when your alternative is a bunch of demon holes,” the Bull said, which was probably true. “Look, here’s the offer: I’ll be writing reports on you, Red will clear them before I send them out. In return, I’ll share _my_ intelligence reports with the Inquisition. You’ll get my boys to fill out your ranks, and you’ll get me to serve as your bodyguard on the frontlines. What do you say?”

“You’ll have to pardon me for a moment,” Dorian said, and returned to where Cassandra was standing at the base of the hill.

“How badly do we need men?” he asked her.

“More and more arrive with every passing day,” Cassandra said. “But… many are untrained, untried. Many come with bows they have only ever used for hunting. Some have never held a weapon before.”

“So, we need them,” Dorian summarized.

“They would be useful,” she said, and that was that.

Their agreement did not mean that Dorian trusted the Bull. Far from it: he had a long and involved talk with Leliana about what he should be looking for.

“No Qunari would accept a ‘Vint so easily,” he insisted. “I want to be able to anticipate the knife in my back before it arrives.”

That was not something he ever anticipated tell the Bull, but he also had not anticipated time travel into a future only made possible by their absence in the present. It had been a trying sort of day, that was for sure.

The Bull avoided him for a time, after that. Dorian put it down to a general distaste for magic in general and magic even most ‘Vints found ill-advised in particular. That mistake lasted until after their move to Skyhold, when Dorian was still running from end to end of the place trying to locate where his advisors had set things up in the midst of all the construction.

“So, you really think I’m sticking around just to stick the knife in you?” the Bull asked as Dorian looked over the edge of the battlements and was trying not to debate the merits of debasing himself by asking the construction workers for directions.

“Well,” Dorian huffed as he turned around to face him. “I doubt that’s all you’re after.”

He expected that the Bull would close the distance between them, use his height to loom over him in an effort to intimidate. He was disappointed when the Bull remained a safe distance away, and continued to look earnest and sincere.

“What would it take for me to convince you otherwise?” the Bull asked.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Dorian replied. “You’re Qunari, I’m Tevinter. Our people have been at war with one another for far longer than either of us has been alive, and you know it as well as I.”

“Better than, probably,” the Bull said. “I actually fought in that war.”

“So you can’t deny that you enjoy butchering my people.”

“Hey! Butchering implies that I’m going to eat them afterwards. Most ‘Vints are just gristle and fat in some wine marinade.”

“Ha!” Dorian replied, not entirely without humor. “Well. That’s certainly true. Still, it is a bit awkward having an actual Qunari spy around.”

The Bull smiled, and leaned against the wall a little bit more, his posture relaxing. “Look, it’s not like you’re the only one who has to deal with uncomfortable politics. I mean, you’re a ‘Vint, and we’re fighting ‘Vints. Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

“No,” Dorian said shortly, his temper rising. “The Venatori are a pustulent boil on Tevinter, not our representatives. Which means that, in order for the Inquisition to function, _I_ must be a representative of Tevinter, and therefore utterly beyond reproach, or else deny my home entirely. Believe me, I’m well aware of how unpalatable my nationality makes me, and by extension the Inquisition, seem. I know how many people, even people who work for the Inquisition, still question whether or not I had anything to do with their Divine’s death, or have my advisors under a blood thrall. I work within that framework every day, it’s a bit difficult to miss.”

“So what makes you think I don’t know that people get all weird about the fact that I’m Qunari?” the Bull asked.

“That… is not a bad point,” Dorian conceded.

“Look, do you know why I told you that I was Ben-Hassrath?” the Bull asked.

“Because you thought it would make us trust you and lower our guard?” Dorian replied, suddenly unsure as to whether he believed that.

“Because I knew that if I didn’t tell you and the truth came out anyway, you would never trust me,” the Bull told him. “I just want a chance, that’s all.”

“I…suppose I can give you that,” Dorian said. “I’ll try, at any rate.”

“That’s all I ask.”

The Bull pushed off the wall, as though to leave, but he didn’t actually go anywhere. “Hey, boss?”

“Bull?”

“I think you’re wrong, about the rank and file of the Inquisition.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I mean, how many of them have you actually talk to?”

“Not very many,” Dorian told him. He looked down over his shoulder. The scene in the courtyard below was the same as it had been before: a make-shift infirmary of canvass tents and dying men. “It doesn’t seem wise.”

“Well, maybe you should change that,” the Bull suggested. “Come on, some of Grimm’s armor should fit you. You stick close to me and keep quiet, and they won’t recognize you. You can get some of their honest, unfiltered opinions.”

“I-” Dorian sighed. He could figure out where Leliana was hiding when she wanted him to know, he supposed. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

And it really didn’t, surprisingly.

“You don’t think it’s strange that the Herald of Andraste is a ‘Vint?” the Bull asked.

“The Maker moves in mysterious ways,” one woman replied. Those had been Josephine’s words first, or perhaps Leliana’s, and he wasn’t sure he liked them in the mouth of someone who believed them to be true.

“It is strange,” admitted her companion. “But, then again, his hand glows. I am not certain that being from Tevinter is the strangest thing about him.”

Dorian liked that response better.

“So did you know in advance that they would both be ambivalent about the ‘Vint thing, or did we get lucky?” Dorian asked later, once the armor had been returned to storage and they’d sat down for a drink.

“Neither,” the Bull told him. “I’ve been listening, and a lot of people don’t care about it very much after the initial shock. It’s weird, but there are demons falling out of the sky.”

“Well then,” Dorian said, raising his glass. “To demons: may they always be the bigger enemy!”

They clinked glasses, and drank.

He began to take the Bull with him, not begrudgingly, but as a matter of course. He brought him along with him to Crestwood, as a matter of fact, and alternate warrior so that Blackwall would be fresh and available to meet with Hawke and her friend. He’d also bought Fiona, as a former Grey Warden, Varric, as Hawke’s friend, and Sera, as the person most likely to stop him from going completely insane.

He made two important discovers with respects to travelling parties that day. First of all, having Blackwall and Fiona in the same group just made the group supremely awkward for everyone: Blackwall would get prickly and defensive and caution her against sharing the Warden’s secrets so openly, and in return Fiona found him to be a tiresome little man whose reputation was clearly blown well out of proportion to his mettle. Secondly, having the Bull and Sera in the same group was just _fun_.

“Stupid darkspawn ruin everything. We're killing them, right?” Sera asked. “Because we are.”

“We are most definitely killing the darkspawn,” Dorian told her. He might not have a full-blown Blight in his past, but he had Felix and Livia, which was more than enough. “You will shoot them and I’ll light them on fire. It’ll be excellent.”

“I’ve got bees,” Sera reminded him. “Your thing where they start spurting blood and guts go all over the place, that works on darkspawns, yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

“Bees and guts!” Sera yelled, pumping her fist in the air.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” the Bull chimed in. “Sera, what if I threw you behind enemy lines?”

“What if you pissed out of your tits?” Sera shot back, which happily set the tone for that particular excursion.

It was a long hard slog through Crestwood and before he’d even managed to meet with Hawke’s Warden contact he’d cleared out a nest of highwaymen and a nest of wyverns, and uncovered an atrocity committed ten years before subsequently causing the mayor of Crestwood to flee, and making the Inquisition the de facto power in the area. He returned to Caer Bronach after finally, finally meeting Stroud feeling tired and worn, head aching from Fiona and Blackwall’s sniping over the fact that he could apparently tell that Corypheus’ calling was false.

At least it had stopped raining.

 Better yet, Sera had gotten bored and subsequently made no less than eighteen types of ice cream in beer for them to sample, which smoothed things over for a bit. On the bright side, Dorian forgot his headache. On the downside, while under the influence of sugar and alcohol, he’d somehow allowed himself to be persuaded to fight the dragon, and come hangover’s end the Bull was so exuberant about the whole thing that he couldn’t really bring himself to recant it.

“She sees us!” Sera called out as the beast circled above them.

“Oh, would you look at that,” the Bull crowed as it landed. “That is magnificent!”

Dorian, horrifyingly, had the fleeting thought that Felix would have loved this: would have loved to be here to see it, would have loved to hear about it after it was done. Then his better sense prevailed, and he remembered that dragons were _dangerous_ and this one in particular was liable to send him into cardiac arrest before biting him in half.

If it weren’t for the memory of Corypheus’ dragon, he most assuredly would not be bothering with the beasts at all. There was no part of that agreed with Sera’s assessment of feeling ‘really alive’ at the end of the fight, and he was absolutely not half composing a letter to Felix as he listened to Sera and the Bull exchange play-by-plays of the fight on their way back to Skyhold.

Anyway, Felix was quite dead at that point, as it happened. Mae had written to tell him; the letter was waiting for him when he returned.

The Bull’s offer of a drink was gratefully accepted when it came mere hours later, particularly when it turned out to be a drink from the strongest alcohol he’d ever had the dubious pleasure of imbibing. He was drunk before he managed to finish his first cup.

The Bull, who had no problem with knocking the maraas-lok back as though it were wine, was even drunker than he was. “Hey. Hey Dorian.”

“Bull?” Dorian replied.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you: you’ve got a fantastic ass.”

“I know, isn’t it just?” Dorian replied, beaming.

The Bull threw his head back and laughed at him, teeth flashing. For the first time, Dorian let himself appreciate how handsome he was.

“You’re an asshole,” the Bull said, clapping him on the shoulder. His hand was very large and very warm, an observation he nearly ruined by snorting. “I bet your asshole looks fantastic too.”

The wonderful thing about being this drunk was that Dorian didn’t need to think about it, didn’t need to reach for any rationalizations or justifications. He was lonely, and fucking was a familiar palliative; the Bull was wonderfully large and, quite possibly, interested. He might as well go for it. Why not?

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Dorian purred. Or tried to purr. Some of the maraas-lok attempted to crawl back up his windpipe, and that rather ruined the effect.

“You okay?” the Bull asked him.

“Fine,” Dorian said, taking another gulp of maraas-lok which had not yet entered his digestive tract to sooth the taste away. His throat burned unpleasantly and the sour taste didn’t quite leave his mouth, which was a shame. He’d seen the Bull naked about as often as the Bull had seen him, and he had, without knowing it, developed the idea that if he went on his knees for the Bull it would settle an ache into his jaw that would linger for _days_.

But, if he had already reached the ‘swallow your own vomit’ stage of drunk, he should probably not attempt a blowjob.

Actually judging by the way he was squinting to make out the Bull’s facial expressions, he’d passed the time to make advances entirely.

“To the absolutely horrific hangover I’ll have tomorrow morning,” Dorian said, raising his glass before draining it.

His throat no longer burned, which definitely should have been a warning. By the time he’d managed to assemble himself to some semblance of order the following morning, he’d very carefully convinced himself that he’d probably imagined the interest, and the Bull had almost certainly be attempting some kind of joke whose humor was lost on the sober mind.

Either that, or the Qun had ordered him to get up close and personal with the Inquisitor. It was an unpalatable thought: the suspicion sat sourly in his stomach, as Cole would doubtless put it if he were able to see past the Mark’s energy and do more than hover at the edge of his desk and guess at the cause of his hurt.

He had promised the Bull that he would give him a chance to prove himself, though, so he tried to put it out of his mind. Even in the worst case scenario, there was a very simple solution: don’t sleep with the Bull.

The Bull had not noticed this solution, as he was either very interested or very determined to follow orders. Dorian was suddenly unsure which alternative he found more horrifying.

 The Bull’s idea of flirtation was _awful_.

‘Polishing his staff’ could be very easily- pathetically easily- ascribed to the Bull’s sense of humor. His rejoinder of ‘you like it’ in return to Dorian’s periodic complaint that he never bathed was likewise completely in keeping with the way of things.

And then, finally, came the line he could not rationalize away.

“That's right. These big muscled hands could tear those robes off while you struggled, helpless in my grip. I'd pin you down, and as you gripped my horns, I would _conquer_ you.”

“Um.” Dorian blinked. Took a look around. The Western Approach remained a desert wasteland. Vivienne and Sera remained present, each looking bored in her own way. “What.”

“Oh. Is that not where we’re going?” the Bull asked, his tone taking a sudden giant leap back toward propriety.

“No it was very much not,” Dorian told him.

“Oh,” the Bull said again. “Sorry about that, boss.”

That really should have rendered the matter closed. In a kinder, or at least more sensible world, it would have. Alas, Dorian inhabited a word where the metric for weird included time travel, so perhaps it was not so strange a thing for it to remain open instead.

“If you’re looking for treasure, you can always look at my chest.”

“You know what the difference between being horny and being horned is? I’m only the first one because I’m standing behind you.”

“You know if you really want to look a bone in the eye, I’ve got-”

“Bull,” Dorian said, not bothering to look up from the ocularum he was searching for shards through. “If you don’t shut up, I will never take you dragon hunting again.”

That threat, at least, seemed to work for a time. Long enough to work their way through the Western Approaches, and secure the area before they needed to deal with the Wardens, at least. Hawke proved a useful distraction: she took one look at the Bull and immediately said. “Shit, I haven’t had to look up at another person since I said goodbye to Aveline.”

The Bull was probably gathering information on her because she had killed the previous Arishok. Or perhaps they were genuinely bonding over the number of doors they had to duck down sideways to get through. Or maybe the Bull simply enjoyed hearing tales of the giant red-haired woman Hawke clearly adored with a passion second only to her adoration for her sister Bethany and  her lover Merrill.

He was glad of it, especially when they went to Adamant. Especially when they fell out of Adamant. The Bull, out of all of them, was probably having the least amount of fun, and none of them were having any fun to begin with. The only way that could have gone worse would be if he were to have brought Sera along as well: but no, it was just him, Hawke, Bull, Stroud, Fiona, and Cassandra.

Which was six people too many, in his opinion. He could already imagine the backlash those in the main body of the Chantry who had yet to simmer down would attempt to generate. Another Tevinter, daring to walk in the Fade, when the evidence of that folly was directly before him? How uncouth.

He did have one comfort in the Fade, though it took him time to pin it down. His first clue was the form the fearlings showed themselves as- spiders, really? He disliked them as much as the next man, but they were hardly the worst things he’d seen. And then there was its words- taunting him not about his father, not even about the hollowness of the image Thedas was slowly coming to hold of him, but rather a generic jab at his friends abandoning him once they learned the truth.

Really. His friends were the least of his worries. If the Bull hadn’t laid eyes on him after reading a long, detailed description of every duel he’d fought and every man he’d fucked he’d be shocked. When they’d first met, Cassandra had thought he was responsible for killing the Divine, along with a great deal of her closest friends. Fiona had been coerced into placing herself and her followers into the thrall of his former mentor, and if there was a worse possible introduction than that he would just as soon as not be introduced at all.

He was far more concerned with the opinions of strangers, these days, with the people whose hearts and minds he had to sway and hold, rather than those who understood that they had no more choice when it came to dealing with the Rifts than he did. And yet, not a peep from the Nightmare.

The final straw came when he saw the graveyard. Everyone else had a tombstone, even those who weren’t with him, but his fear? That was nowhere to be seen.

That’s when it clicked, and Dorian started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” the Bull asked, looking worried. _Madness_ , his tombstone said, and here Dorian was, laughing like he’d gone insane.

Dorian did his best to tamp down on the laughter before he responded. It mostly worked. “I’ve asked Cole why he doesn’t speak about me the same way he does about you. He said the Mark made me too bright to see. I can’t help but get the impression that the Nightmare is experiencing similar difficulties.”

“Must be nice,” Hawke said shortly. She was crouched over a tombstone that was lying face down and cracked. She’d lifted one half and dropped it back down, and did not touch the other.

When all was said and done, and they’d returned to Skyhold at last, Dorian thought about that. It had seemed rather obvious in the Fade that the Nightmare had, if not no hold over him, than less hold over him than the others. But once outside the Fade, it didn’t take very long for him to remember that lesser demons were still visiting him nightly.

Solas was, sadly, the only thing approaching someone who might be able to answer his questions, but Dorian wasn’t sure if his answer had more to do with his dislike of Dorian or the actual truth.

“Many demons feed off of base emotions, and can guess, through interactions with your sleeping mind, what will provoke such emotions. You provide them willingly, if not knowingly, with all the information they require to torment you. From the sound of things, your Nightmare was more powerful, and more used to hiding until it had learned all it needed to inspire terror in its victims, but that is only a guess. I was not there to see it for myself.”

Or possibly Solas was just grouchy because he’d missed a chance to enter his beloved Fade.

Dorian had been musing on this matter as he walked across the courtyard, turning the corner at just the right time to watch Cassandra knock the Bull flat on his back. He waited, watching, a little surprised when the Bull just picked himself off the ground and let Cassandra hit him again without retaliation.

That was…odd, to say the least.

Cassandra relinquished the stick with her customary disgusted noise and one final parting shot. “Perhaps you can talk some sense into him.”

That left just him, the Bull, and the several scores of people milling around in the courtyard.

“Come on big guy,” the Bull said. “Let me have it.”

“I don’t suppose you could explain the point of this?” Dorian asked, hefting the stick.

“It’s a Qunari thing,” the Bull explained. He was tense and it made his words terse. “Just hit the fear out of me.”

Dorian raised an eyebrow. “You can’t just drink yourself into a stupor and find someone to fuck you like the rest of us?”

“This is a Qunari thing,” the Bull said firmly.

It was on the tip of his tongue to point out that drinking and sex were _not_ Qunari things and _were_ activities the Bull partook in on a regular basis, but that seemed a bit crass, when the Bull was so obviously shaken. It seemed more than a bit crass, when he noticed it and felt no pleasure in his discomfort, whether because he also had found the Fade to be disquieting, or because he simply no longer found provoking the Bull to be pleasurable.

His agreement was on the tip of his tongue when the Bull mistook his silence for hesitancy and tried to provoke him.

“Come on, you can’t tell me you’ve never given a beating before.”

“Not in the way you’re implying,” he replied flatly. Dorian let the stick fall into the perpetual mud with supreme distaste and walked away without another word.

He didn’t see much of the Bull in the following days, and would have quite happily continued to not see him if he hadn’t come to see Dorian in the stables just as he was getting ready to leave.

“I’d like to apologize,” he said.

Dorian scowled. “Really? Whatever for?”

“I was trying to provoke you into hitting me, and I said- what I said was way over the line,” the Bull apologized.

“And unnecessary. I was going to do it, you know,” Dorian told him. “Not that it would have made the slightest bit of difference. You’re not a mage, Bull, and you spend the majority of your time surrounded by them. Your strength and your fear don’t really matter; you are disconnected from the Fade even more than perhaps anyone but the Tranquil and the dwarves, and can’t even conjure up so much as a spark. You make a wholly untempting target for demonic possession in present company.”

“Are you trying to comfort me or insult me?” the Bull asked sounding bewildered.

“Take it as you will,” Dorian replied, because he wasn’t entirely certain either.

The Bull took it as his cue to stand there and watch Dorian. Dorian, in turn, decided that he would ride the Bog Unicorn, simply because he knew the beast disquieted the Bull. He bridled and saddled it. The Bull stood there, and waited.

He didn’t wait in vain, as it happened.

“I promised that I would give you a chance to earn my trust,” Dorian said, not looking away from the undead horse. “That I would judge you upon your own merits, rather than as one of the bogeymen whose raids punctuated my childhood.”

A part of him had been hoping that the Bull would react defensively, would try and make another plea for Dorian’s trust. More of him was unsurprised when he did not.

“And then I lashed out with something Tevinter’s known for, rather than something you’d done,” the Bull said. “I fucked up. I was scared and wanted to provoke you, and I fucked up because of that. It won’t happen again.”

That should have been enough. It was so obvious that it should have been enough that Dorian made himself take a mental step back from his own simmering anger to contemplate its source.

There were all manner of prevarications that he was tamping down upon. Father had several lectures composed on the subject of genteel treatment of one’s property, and Dorian still remembered the words and could parrot them back without the slightest thought.

The marks left by a beating were unsightly, and showed a lack of proper management on behalf of the owner, at best. At worst, it was a sign of sadism, of a lack of self control, of deviancy on par with Dorian’s own. There were better ways to discipline one’s slaves after, ways that left no marks, that seemed very humane when done out of one’s sight, on the very periphery of one’s awareness.

If he wished to be rather cruel about it, he might have pointed out that keeping one’s house in order was supposed to be the job of the wife. Father had been fond enough of mentioning that in his lectures later on, even when such a fact had little to do with the speech’s provocation.

All of those made rather poor excuses for the system they’d come from.

So, there it was then: the familiar growing bitterness of his own complacency and familiar disgust of regurgitating his father’s bile unexamined. It was nothing to do with the Bull at all, no matter how convenient the external outlet was.

“I accept your apology,” Dorian said. “I’m not unfamiliar with how these things get away from you, in the heat of the moment.”

“No, really?” the Bull asked, grin stretching wide.

“Keep pushing and you may yet get a demonstration,” Dorian retorted, swinging into the saddle. From atop the horse, he was taller than the Bull.

Bull continued to smile up at him, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Safe travels, boss.”

“That’s it,” Dorian couldn’t resist calling after him. “Safe travels? No atrocious puns, no terrible innuendos?”

“I’ll be honest, boss, it’s hard to picture you riding the Bull when you’re riding on top of that thing.”

Dorian laughed. The sound caused one of the nearby horses, already unnerved by the presence of the Bog Unicorn, to whiney anxiously.

“Well, do try not to be too bereft while I’m gone.”

He was not bereft while Dorian was gone. Instead, he was contacted by the Qun with the offer of an alliance.

“Bull,” Dorian said upon receiving the news. “What exactly have you been telling them about me?”

“The truth,” the Bull said, adding in the face of Dorian’s continued skepticism. “I’ve told them that you’re an Altus, that you’ve left Tevinter, and that you’re doing your best.”

That was more than a little light on the details, Dorian noted, not sure what he could do with the observation.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Qun’s never offered an alliance before, have they?” Dorian asked.

“They haven’t,” the Bull replied. “This is new. It could be a good thing- the start of something.”

“Conversion through diplomacy, rather than the sword?” Dorian asked.

“It’s not like that,” the Bull said, sounding genuinely hurt. It was the first defensive reaction Dorian had ever been able to provoke out of him, after nearly two years worth of needling over Seheron and saarebas alike.

“Than conversion through qamek, then,” Dorian corrected himself. The Bull’s frown deepened.

“This really has you rattled, doesn’t it?” Dorian asked.

“No,” the Bull replied in a way that clearly meant _yes_. “I’m just used to them being over there. I’m not sure that I like them being here.”

“Neither do I,” Dorian admitted.

“Are you willing to find out, though?”

Dorian hesitated. His first reaction was the same reaction many in Tevinter would have to such a deal: no. No self-respecting Tevinter would ever deal with the Qunari on equal terms such as an alliance would imply. There was a very good chance that it would degenerate his status from a pariah at the center of a particularly amusing political circus to a genuine exile, barred from ever returning home.

On the other hand- think of the opportunities. Think of the relative ease of implanting spies into their ranks, to sabotage them, or merely observe them at a closer angle. Think of the people who would knock upon the door of a person who could present them with such an opportunity.

He doubted very much that the Qun intended for this alliance to work, particularly not in the long term. But in the short term, perhaps it would be enough to provide him with the contacts he needed to start making inroads into Tevinter. To stop being an outsider again. To say nothing of the benefits to their current war against Corypheus.

It was worth a shot. “When do we meet your contact?”

They met Gatt on the Storm Coast in a fortnight’s time, the rolling sea and chill more than enough to ruin the pleasant humidity. The elf was clearly trying not to be combative, and it was clearly a struggle. He plainly admitted it was a struggle, actually, going as far as to state that it had nearly landed him in reeducation, and reveal the cause.

His master had bought him along to Seheron for ‘company’. His master had been killed by the Bull when Gatt was eight. That was more than adequate to explain the temper, even if Dorian still found it to be grating.

The only thing that stood out as odd was his denial that they were here to convert people, but Dorian supposed that Gatt wasn’t the sort to convert. A job for the priesthood, the tamassrans, not the Ben-Hassrath. And it would have been very difficult to evangelize over Venatori corpses anyway.

And then, quite suddenly, that was the least odd thing about the scenario.

“Can they hold that hill?” he asked.

“No. They could hold them off, long enough for the dreadnaught to pass, but they’d die,” the Bull said. He seemed riveted to the spot, not lifting his horn, not looking away from the carnage about to play out below them, one way or another.

It was up to Dorian, apparently, to decide which way it would go. Up to him, again.

He’d never ordered anyone to their deaths before Stroud- or, at least, he’d never had to look anyone in the eye and tell them to do it. He relished the idea of telling the Bull which of his people to watch die even less.

But he was clearly going to have to, or else damn the Chargers through his own inaction.

“Sound the retreat, Bull,” the Inquisitor ordered.

The Bull sounded the retreat. The dreadnaught went up in flames, the Qunari alliance along with it.

The trip back to Skyhold was a tense one. Dorian half expected to wake at night to find Gatt standing over him with a knife, or else to wake to the cacophony that the Bull’s murder would surely inspire. He slept lightly and with his staff close at hand.

But, no. Gatt had no desire to murder the Bull, and in the absence of such demands from the Qun, he was willing to leave, even angrier than he had arrived.

And the matter of the Bull’s execution was given over to others.

The Bull had expected it, of course. They all had, and were on the highest of alerts, but the Bull didn’t view them as a threat so much as formality. He might have had the right of it, too: Dorian had the bodies autopsied, something about the man he’d been closest to twigging a necromancer’s instinct. Sure enough, one had a tumor growing out of the back of his neck, and the other’s vitaar had covered a startling array of lesions. They were dying anyway: why not die to make a point that there would be no forgiveness for the Iron Bull?

“You could have warned me,” Dorian said, watching one of the would-be assassins impact messily against the mountainside.

“Have you spent years learning how to hide your every tell and expression from trained professionals?”

“I was born and raised with the understanding that I would one day be a magister,” Dorian replied.

“It’s different,” the Bull told him. “Believe me, it’s different.”

Dorian was less certain of that. Especially under these circumstances. He’d often expected to hear the news of his disownment and exile from the business end of an assassin’s dagger. It was a surprise that it hadn’t happened already.

Somehow, he doubted this point of commonality would do much for the Bull.

“Tal-Va-fucking-shoth,” the Bull grumbled.

“The Iron fucking Bull,” Dorian corrected him. “You have a place here, and people who care for you. Who need you. You will be fine, I promise you that.”

“Thanks, boss. Yeah. I think I will be too.”

He was, apparently, fine enough to show up in Dorian’s bed unannounced.

“I caught your hints about wanting to ride the Bull,” he said, bouncing a little on his mattress.

“You have a very strange definition of the word ‘hints’. If I were any less subtle we might have fucked behind the tavern a month ago.”

The Bull didn’t laugh, but he did smile, a predatory, heated smile that Dorian should have found quite pleasant.

He did find it pleasant, but it was not pleasant enough to drown out the sudden swell of anxiety.

“Wait,” Dorian blurted out as the Bull got out of bed and began to stalk over to him. “Let’s- let’s discuss this a moment.”

The Bull stopped, taking a moment to study his face. The smile disappeared, replaced by a frown. “What’s the problem? You don’t think I’m now a really super-secret spy now, do you?”

“No,” Dorian replied, because the idea honestly hadn’t occurred. “I merely wish to know what you want from this.”

“I want to make you feel good,” was the Bull’s prompt reply.

“And after?” Dorian asked.

The Bull blinked.

“It’s only- we do have to work together,” Dorian said. “And I must admit, I’ve come to expect the ‘after’ to contain certain things which would make that difficult.”

The Bull was prompt with his answer. “This can be whatever you want it to be. I’m good with light and casual. If you want something more…” His voice trailed off suggestively.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Dorian pointed out. “What do you want out of this?”

The Bull, it seemed, had no answer for that.

“Are you doing this now because you’ve lost the Qun?” Dorian pressed.

“No!” the Bull denied.

“It’s all right if it is,” Dorian assured him. “I’ve been a port in a storm before, after all. I have no objection to being so again. It’s merely better to know that sort of thing up front, I find. It can be difficult to walk away from, if it’s discovered later, I find. So, again: what is it you want?”

“I don’t know,” the Bull admitted. “I- want someone to tell me what to want, I guess.”

 _Want me_ , Dorian almost said.

It was so tempting to say it. The Bull would obey, he was sure. He’d cleave to Dorian, and use him to fill whatever void the Qun had left behind even as he let himself be used by Dorian. And then what? Would the Bull wake up one day, with the sudden and clear knowledge that it had never been anything more than desperation that had drawn him to Dorian? Would he break it off, or try to change himself, mould himself into the shape Dorian wanted him to be in, just as he had done with the Qun?

“I don’t think I can do that for you,” he forced himself to say instead.

“That’s fair,” the Bull replied. “Yeah, that’s- fair enough, boss.”

He turned and left without another word.


	4. Chapter 4

The day after his father arrived in Skyhold dawned far too bright and early for his tastes, for all that it was still winter and if they were somewhere with actual sunlight it would be well into midmorning and a perfectly reasonable time to drag oneself out of bed. He was actually in his bed too, which he didn’t remember happening. There was a large, warm indent next to him.

The Bull had stayed the night, then. He almost wished that he could think that anything untoward had happened. The familiarity of it would have been something, at least.

Instead, the Bull brought him bacon, eggs, toast, a strong cup of tea and a stronger dram of Stitches’ hangover cure. Dorian took it gratefully, for all that the hangover was less severe than he would have supposed. He had a faint, blurred memory of cool water sliding down his throat, and the Bull’s voice coaxing him: _That’s it, boss, nice and slow_.

“Josephine said to tell you to come join them in the War Room, at your leisure,” the Bull told him. “I think she added that last part when she noticed I had breakfast.”

“Ah,” Dorian said. “Well.”

He ate for a moment, the silence no less awkward for the perfectly good excuse he had for not filling it.

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad do you think the fallout from this will be?” Dorian asked.

The Bull opened his mouth, visibly reconsidered, and closed it again.

“Ah. That bad, then.”

“It’s probably not as bad as you’re thinking it will be.”

“I’m trying very hard not to think of it, I’ll have you know.”

“Hey.” The Bull’s hand found his. “You know that we’re all on your side, right?”

“I have no doubt of that. You’ve all hitched too many hopes on me to let a little thing like blood magic stand in the way.”

“We’d all be on your side, even if you weren’t the Inquisitor.”

“Well.” He doubted that. It had taken a lot of doing, to reach a point where the nobility of Southern Thedas no longer worried that he was some kind of double agent- or, at least, they’d stopped doing it where he could overhear. If it weren’t for Josephine, he didn’t think he’d have that much success. “I believe you wouldn’t be on his side.”

A Tevinter who would definitely perform blood magic trumped someone who was merely Tevinter and only potentially a blood mage, after all.

Breakfast was finished, and then the Bull left him to get dressed. He paused, good leg hovering over the first step.

“Hey, boss?”

“Yes, Bull?”

“Can we talk about this later?”

There was little chance that the ‘this’ was not what Dorian feared it would be.

“Of course,” Dorian said anyway.

He made himself presentable, hair coifed and face made. His clothes were clean and pressed, even if they weren’t the sort of garments he would have been caught dead in, back home. Though, to be fair, a monsoon would probably kill anyone wearing this amount of wool in a matter of hours.

He should probably stop putting things off.

As she had implied, Josephine was already in the War Room, along with Leliana and Cullen. They stopped talking when he walked in.

“Before you begin, I would like to point out that we could have avoided this mess if you’d simply acceded to my wish that my father not have any contact with the Inquisition,” Dorian said.

“So noted,” Cullen said, and nothing more.

Dorian had been expecting an argument, recriminations along the lines of ‘if only you’d told us the full truth’. To not have an argument left him feeling wrong-footed and slightly put out.

“Well, good,” Dorian said. He leaned down over the war table, his eyes draw up to the north, where home was. There was a token in the shape of a small tent, representing Movran the Under and his clan. There was also a brazier for Maevaris in Qarinus, and a cloaked figure in Minrathous for the agent of Leliana’s she’d sent to retrieve a book they needed to discern Corypheus’ true name.

That was it. That was the extent of their influence in Tevinter. It wasn’t enough to bring home whatever Fereldans there were who might have survived this long, much less effect actual change.

“So,” he continued, looking back up to his advisors. “What’s the fallout?”

Later, Varric would claim in three of his books that you could hear his shout of “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’VE ARRESTED MY FATHER?” around the whole of Skyhold, thusly demonstrating his ability to say things which had never happened but were nonetheless true.

The dungeon of Skyhold was not, generally speaking, very populated. Alexius more or less lived down there, now, when he wasn’t working under guard in the mage tower. There were, occasionally, others. Movran. Ser Ruth. Erimond.

And now, his father, along with the people who had already attempted to kill him for attempting blood magic on their much-vaunted Herald of Andraste.

The cells were, subsequently, extremely full.

Dorian stared at them in mute, slack-jawed horror, until he caught sight of the familiar habit of a Chantry mother. That provoked him to speech.

“What are you doing here, Mother Giselle?” he hissed. “You don’t even pretend to like me!”

“Don’t be ridiculous, child,” she sniffed.

“Relax, Altus,” Krem said, elbowing his way to the front of the cell and then swinging the door open. “Most of us are just here to have a look-see. I’m just here to translate their sniping, it’s hilarious.”

He jerked his thumb over to the cells which contained his father and Alexius.

“If you’re that bored, Cremissius, I can always speak with your mother about finding you something to do,” Dorian snapped. He turned towards Alexius, catching the bird Krem flipped him out of the corner of his eye, and switched to Tevene. “And what do you have to snipe about? You joined a cult bent on world domination, nearly used our work to destroy the world, and also tried to murder me on no less than three occasions.”

“He’s your father,” Alexius said, which only brought home the fact that he really couldn’t control who was going to learn about what had happened in the slightest.

“And I lived in your house for eight years and loved your son like a brother,” Dorian replied, spreading his arms wide to encompass the whole of the dungeons. “Here we all are anyway!”

He turned back to Krem. “Don’t you dare translate that.”

“Wasn’t going to,” Krem replied, holding up his hands.

Dorian took a deep, fortifying breath, and switched back to Trade. “If everyone could listen for a moment, please!”

The chatter died down.

“Now, I’m going use small words, so you can remember them and repeat them to anyone you meet: I don’t want my father killed. Is that clear? _Do not murder my father_.”

There was some awkward shuffling. Someone coughed. His father said, softly, “Dorian.”

“No,” Dorian replied quickly. He did not turn to look at his father. “Simply because I don’t want you dead does not mean that I wish to speak with you. I have literally hundreds of things I would rather be doing, all of which are more important to the cause of _not having the world literally end_.”

He turned to the guards. “Clear the cells out of everyone who is not actually supposed to be imprisoned. And keep an eye on my father, please.”

The senior-most guard nodded. “Does that include the people who tried to kill your father?” she asked.

“No,” Dorian decided. “Leave them here. I’ll deal with them later.”

In the meantime, being the Inquisitor was a lot of work.

* * *

 

It took a long time for Alexius to become desperate enough to send them a missive. Time enough for Cullen to begin making pointed remarks about the progress they might have made with the Templars, who, after all, would surely be _full_ of friendly faces and would _love_ to work with an organization that had the son of a magister as their figurehead.

Granted, the rebel mages weren’t exactly full of friendly faces either, but Felix was there, and that was about as much friendliness as he’d ever needed to do anything in life.

The invitation arrived, their War Council hatched a plan, and he walked straight into the trap. He brought along the Bull, because he was the most experienced at killing Tevinters, and Vivienne, because she was the most familiar with dealing with the rebel mages, and Sera, because if she shot him in the back she would at least mean it with some affection.

Things moved very quickly after that. He had a standoff with the guard acting as a butler, for a moment. Then he had a talk with Alexius, which was less a talk and more an application of pressure to every single weak point Alexius possessed that Dorian did not, made all the more devastating by the way Felix backed him up. Alexius was too distracted to notice that the Inquisition had breached his defenses until he was already surrounded: and by that point, Dorian had made him spitting mad.

He’d been anticipating that Alexius would try something with time magic from the start. The counter was on his lips and ready to flow through his fingers, and with the vortex opening directly in front of him there was no way he could fail to nullify the spell entirely.

Then the Bull tackled him to ground. Because of course he did. Of course. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, really.

“Do you have the slightest idea what you’ve done?” Dorian snarled once the Venatori they’d materialized near had been disposed of.

“What I’ve done?” the Bull repeated incredulously. “I don’t even know where we are!”

“We’re still in Redcliffe Castle,” Dorian snapped. “The more pertinent question might be _when_ are we, seeing as Alexius was using time magic and _someone_ interrupted my counterspell!”

“Hey, you hired me to act as a frontline bodyguard,” the Bull retorted. “That means that when some ‘Vint starts opening a fucking Rift right in front of you, I’m going to pull you out of the way.”

“No, I hired you because that will make you easier to deal with when you get the orders to stick the knife in my back,” Dorian told him.

The Bull opened his mouth to argue.

“Shut. Up.” Dorian said, spinning around. There was a table at the far end of room, with some papers on it. He skimmed through them, pointedly ignoring the sounds of the Bull searching the bodies of the guards as he got a hold of his temper again.

“Find anything?” he asked eventually, in a more or less normal tone of voice.

“Found some keys,” the Bull said, jangling them to demonstrate. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“A date,” Dorian informed him. “And no, I didn’t. I know we’re in the future, because Alexius was attempting to manipulate the past but I managed to reverse that before being interrupted.”

“That, and there’s red lyrium growing out of the walls,” the Bull pointed out, which was certainly a sound bit of deductive reasoning.

“Well, however far in the future we went doesn’t matter, I suppose. Whatever happened between meeting with Alexius and now, it can be undone,” Dorian assured him. Theorized, really. Not that the Bull needed to know that. “They weren’t natural events, but rather a byproduct of the Mark being missing, thus leaving the Breach unsealed. Changing them probably won’t even warp the Veil further, unlike what Alexius did in order to indenture the mages.”

“Probably?” the Bull echoed.

“Yes, probably. We’re currently beyond the boundaries of the farthest reaches of thaumaturgy, in answer to your previous question,” Dorian replied. “You’ll have to let me know if you experience any side effects. Horns falling off, bits shrinking, anything of the sort.”

“You finished?” the Bull asked, though he did look a bit disquieted, which Dorian took a vicious sort of satisfaction in.

“Not even remotely,” Dorian said. “But we may as well get a move on, see what my former mentor’s done with the place.”

Alexius had imprisoned the other members of the Inquisition, as it happened. They found Vivienne first, which was cruel: though the corruption the red lyrium had wrought on her body was obvious, her mind was intact, and she remained as forthright and imperious as she’d ever been, if a little more tired. It made him think that anyone they found would be like that.

Sera was… Sera was not. She was there still, plainly, but she was more than tired, she was frightened where before she had been fearless, and wouldn’t believe him, at first, when he told her what was happening, had happened, would never happen once he had a say in it.

There were moments which seemed fresh with horror every time you thought of them, as though they had caught you unawares in your own mind. Finding Sera in her cell after a year of torment was one of them.

Watching Leliana draw her blade across Felix’s throat was another.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I could probably manage myself until you closed the Breach,” Felix offered, once it had never happened again and the rebel mages had agreed to ally themselves with the Inquisition.

“Do you think you could manage it and still make it back to Tevinter?” Dorian asked. Well, Dorian pointed out. Journeying was hard, even in the best of health. Felix didn’t have that.

“I don’t _have_ to return to Tevinter. I’m sure I can manage dying just as well here as I could there,” Felix said.

“But do you _want_ to die here?” Dorian asked, and knew with sudden certainty that he would not be able to bear up under the strain of watching Felix die a second time, even if he did want to be the sort of person who could comfort a friend in their dying moments. “I would have thought the stench of dog shit would be enough to put that off.”

“It is rather off-putting,” Felix conceded, and that was that.

“So it’s decided. You’ll set off for home tomorrow,” Dorian said.

“Yes. Though, not tonight,” Felix said thoughtfully. “Do you think the tavern will still take my coin?”

“They will if I’m there,” Dorian promised. Leliana was handling the particulars of arranging transport for the mages and seeing to Alexius’ imprisonment. The Bull was avoiding him, probably off writing a report about it all for his Ben-Hassrath masters. Vivienne was having what looked to be a truly terrifying ‘polite conversation’ with the Grand Enchanter. Which just left…

“Sera!” he shouted, and Sera poked her head up from behind a cart.

“What?” she shouted back.

“Felix is buying us drinks!” he replied. “Are you coming?”

Sera was eager enough to push her way through the crowds of people at the promise of free ale, but that didn’t stop her from narrowing her eyes suspiciously at Felix as she drew even with him.

“So are you one of those really demony mages like Dorian or-” she began in lieu of introducing herself.

“I’m a _necromancer_ , Sera, we’ve been over this-”

“I’m a terrible mage, actually,” Felix interrupted.

“Like, you do terrible magic, or what?”

For an answer, Felix cupped his hands, his fingertips a mere inch away from each other as he concentrated.

“Maker’s arse, Felix, don’t drain yourself dry the night before you set out for the other end of the continent,” Dorian complained.

“Hang on, I’ve almost got it,” Felix muttered, going cross-eyed in concentration. After a moment, a few sparks flew between his fingers and nearly coalesced into a flame before being extinguished. “Aha!”

“That’s it?” Sera demanded, sounding as though she didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved, and was quite upset about it.

“Felix has never had a single demon bother him in his entire life,” Dorian said with a sigh. “Even the one they got for his Harrowing gave him the demonic equivalent of ‘I’ll have my people contact your people’ and then wandered off into the Fade to await better prey.”

“Rude,” Felix chided, reaching up mess his hair.

“But true,” Dorian said as he batted Felix’s hand away.

They made a night of it, that last night they had together. Sera, once assured that Felix was the mage least likely to come over all demony, was more than happy to drink his coin and laugh at his outrageous stories about their youth, and Dorian’s outraged corrections.

“You’ll have to keep him out of trouble for me,” Felix told her, easily the most solemn thing he’d said all that night, and that counted what he’d said during Dorian’s confrontation with Alexius. “He has a terrible nose for trouble.”

Dorian snorted. “Hardly. We might have gotten into trouble together, but I was always the one who made sure we got out of it.”

“I’ll have eyes on him, right until the end,” Leliana promised him the following morning, Felix setting out on his wagon to the northeast, the rest of them preparing to head west to Haven. “They’ll keep him from trouble.”

She’d had eyes on him last night, clearly. Dorian debated the merits of calling her out on it, and found them lacking. “That’s a highly unrealistic expectation to place upon your agents,” he said instead.

“They’ll keep him from harm,” she amended. “They’ll ensure that he returns home.”

And then he would die. There was nothing new in the certainty of it. Dorian had lived, for years now, with the knowledge that Felix would die, and he would not be there when he passed. There was no reason to be consumed by it as he watched Felix’s wagon disappear from his sight. There was no reason why it should sit behind his heart like a tumor, and make his eyes burn, and his stomach queasy.

There must be some other reason for it, then. The sun was at just the wrong angle to burn his eyes. The horse had a lame leg and was trotting funny. The lake stank of fish and the land stank of dog shit and the food was getting worse and worse at every meal they took, and _vishante kaffas_ , Bull, don’t you ever bathe?

 “Human sweat smells like pork that’s been left out in the sun too long,” the Bull replied, too damn easily. “Just saying.”

That only conjured up memories of the one truly bad turn Felix had had while Dorian still lived under the Alexius roof, a three-day fit of twitching and fever and, yes, sweat. It hadn’t smelled like pork. It had smelled like creeping rot, black mold, and embalming fluids.

He’d blown up at Gereon the very next week. Looking back on it now, he had to wonder if the crux of the matter hadn’t been that he’d known that Felix couldn’t be saved, and that any attempt to alter time was futile at best, but rather that he couldn’t bear to watch his dearest friend die, and felt that sabotage was the best way to get out of it.

He didn’t want that to be the case. But the possibility of what he might find if he looked too closely nagged at him, became the sort of thing that demons would hiss at him should he pay them enough attention in his self-reflection.

“It is a bit early for celebrations, is it not Herald?” Mother Giselle stood by her window, her hair free for the first time in Dorian’s memory. It was silver and braided close to her head. Nothing remarkable there, for all that it pointed to the unhappy fact that he’d chosen to drink right outside of her bedroom.

Dorian turned back from her window and up at the view from the roof: one of the moons glinting off the snow that surrounded Haven, the other swallowed completely behind the Breach. It wasn’t merely obscured, as the clouds might do, either: no outline was visible, no light shown through. It was just gone, as though it had never been, as though the passing of hours wouldn’t bring it back into sight before the long winter’s night ended. That was eminently more remarkable than some Chantry biddy’s hair.

“It’s early for a memorial service too,” Dorian replied. “And yet, here I sit.”

“Someone you care for is dying, then?” she asked.

“Felix Alexius,” Dorian said with forced cheer. “Son of Gereon Alexius, the man we’ve got down in the cells. My first, dearest, and only friend. He’s gravely ill and headed back home. I’ll never see him again, even if he does make it.”

“That does not sound like a terrible reason to grieve to me,” Mother Giselle said.

“He’s not dead yet,” Dorian pointed out. “He’s-” He took another drink instead of finishing that sentence.

He didn’t spend half as much time as he pretended being drunk. When he was so, it was generally because it provided a good excuse to do something he would have done anyway. Sleep with the wrong man, for example. Cry about the unfairness of life.

“Felix used to sneak treats for me into his father’s study while I worked,” Dorian recalled. “I would tell him that I didn’t want him to get into any trouble on my account, but he’d always tell me ‘I like trouble’. Tevinter could use more men like him, more people who put the good of others above themselves. Even in illness, he was the best of us. When he was around you just knew things could be better.”

“It sounds as though you think highly of him,” Mother Giselle said, clearly feeling out his mood. “Even more highly than you think of yourself?”

“More highly than I, the Herald of Andraste? Perish the thought.” Dorian snorted. “That’s another reason not to believe it. If Andraste really were to chose a Herald, really were to want someone from Tevinter to represent her, she would have chosen him. She would probably have cured him, too. We’d all have been the better for it.”

“You likely would have died in the Conclave with the others, in such a case.”

Dorian shrugged. “Or, possibly, I would not have been there at all.” He took a deep, fortifying breath, and when it ended and he felt no more fortified, he pressed a hand over his face. If Mother Giselle should ask why he’d done it, he would lie and tell her that the light from the Breach was hurting his eyes. “I didn’t even say goodbye. Not really. Not properly. It was my last chance, and all I did was wish him a safe journey home. I should have-”

“You should, I think, get down from the roof,” Mother Giselle said. “From what you have told me, your friend would not have wanted you to trip and fall off.”

Dorian laughed bitterly. “To say nothing of the fact that it is doubtful the Mark would work if attached to a corpse. Fear not, Mother Giselle. I have no intention of killing myself in a state of inebriation.”

He came back inside through her window, partially out of spite, though there wasn’t much in the way of snow or mud on his boots to drag through her quarters. He retired back to his own bed, staring up at the ceiling.

The mages who had volunteered to aid him as he sealed the Breach had already arrived. They would do it tomorrow, and with luck that would be the end of it.

For a time, it even seemed like he would be lucky. The Breach was sealed, with the mages help. They returned to Haven in celebration. People laughed, and danced, and drank. And why shouldn’t they? It was over.

Dorian sat to the side, and missed Felix like a limb.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late for him to catch up with Felix in Denerim before he embarked. Perhaps he could accompany him back home, could be the sort of friend Felix deserved. He would have to come back, of course, but with the Breach sealed, surely the problem of Rifts would lessen somewhat. Surely it would be alright for him to do this one last thing for his friend.

All of the surelies and perhapses in the world did not account for the Elder One.

He wasn’t sure anything _could_ account for the Elder One, not the man himself, corrupted by the Blight in ways that would, thankfully, never touch Felix, and not his army of Red Templars, corrupted in ways that even in that dark, impossible future, Sera and Vivienne had not succumbed to. Certainly, they could not stand against the dragon he had at his beck and call.

It wasn’t a battle, it wasn’t a siege, it was a _massacre_ , and there was nothing Dorian could do to prevent it. Nothing Dorian could do but be perversely grateful that Felix was gone after all.

That, and set the trebuchet against the mountain above Haven. That, and bury the village and hope that he could bury the Elder One along with it.

“Know me, and know what you have pretended to be,” he intoned. “Exalt the Elder One, the will that is Corypheus.”

Even if he had not recognized the name from Varric’s stories, he would have known it to be Tevinter, would have recognized the cadences of his speech as belonging to someone who had spoken exclusively in Tevene for so long that Trade was a foreign tongue. What was it that made a black sheep so remarkable?

They had that in common, up to a point. That and, Dorian was suddenly fiercely determined to prove, _nothing else_.

“You presume much, to think that I pretend to be you, much less that I would exalt you,” he spat in Tevene. “I know what you are. You are the personification of everything wrong with my home.”

There were many words for home in Tevene. The one he used was often translated, in a poetic fashion, as heartland, or motherland, depending on which version the translator found to be more evocative. Dorian meant it with every grossly sentimental connotation that had ever been ascribed to it.

There was a struggle, then, so much as he could manage such. His staff was gone, and the others had, for once, taken him at his word and fled, probably sweeping up the stragglers in their wake. The dragon was at his back, snarling. He was, quite frankly, less frightened by it than he was by the way Corypheus was doing something that made his Mark flare up and then attempt to leap from his skin.

“And you used the Anchor to undo my work.” Corypheus sneered.  “The gall.”

“Good,” Dorian hissed between his teeth. “I would use it to wipe you out of existence if I knew how.”

It was supposed to be a metaphor. A morality tale. A lesson on hubris and the dangers of forbidden magics that their poor Southern cousins had, in ignorance, taken literally. It wasn’t supposed to be _real._

It was real, and threw him with enough force that he felt blood trickle down his neck from where his head had knocked against the trebuchet’s supports. He reached out blindly, and, by some miracle, found the staff he’d been using during the fighting earlier.

“I will not suffer even an unknowing rival,” Corypheus said. Behind him, Dorian saw the signal flare go up.

They others were safely out of the way, then. Another miracle.

“Well, good luck with that. Do let me know how that turns out,” Dorian said, and sent the trebuchet in motion.

He didn’t expect to reach the Chantry in time, which turned out to be accurate. He also did not expect the ground to open up beneath his feet. Nor did he expect to wake up again.

After a long moment of growing even more chilled, though, he had to concede to reality, and force himself upright and walking, and hope it was in the right direction.

It was. Three miracles in a night such as this one was more than enough for Dorian. He was quite content to pass out rather than risk another.

“Really, elven? Are you sure?” Dorian asked.

Solas looked deeply offended, which, to be fair, was his default expression around Dorian.

“I only mean that I’ve seen it before,” Dorian explained. “Pictures of it, at least, in paintings of magisters from Ancient Tevinter. Somnaborium they were called: Vessels of the Dreamers.”

“Well, they were stolen from Elvhenan,” Solas said.

“We stole a lot from the elves,” Dorian mused. “And Corypheus isn’t far removed from that time… you know, it occurs to me that we need never tell anyone that it came from the elves. It fits the narrative well enough as a Tevinter device.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Dorian shrugged. “One of the Magisters who corrupted the Golden City returns, seeding chaos and threatening to rend the world apart. And the only one with the power to deny him that is another ‘Vint, the son of a magister, no less: Andraste did that on purpose, or so people would say. Why shouldn’t the orb be of Tevinter origins as well?”

“Because it is not,” Solas said flatly. “It was created by the elves, and I would not have another one of my people’s accomplishments, no matter how dubious, stolen by Tevinter.”

“But if it would prevent people from turning on the elves- prevent purges, or…”

Solas might have softened at that. It was hard to tell. “Even if it was well meant. That orb is a part of Elvhen history, more than enough of which has already been lost.”

The most graceful way Dorian had of accepting that point was to nod.

“Does this mean you’ve decided to take up the mantle of the Herald of Andraste?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Dorian replied. “I still don’t believe it. But if it helps…”

“I’ll set things right,” he said later. There was a sword in his hand, a courtyard full of tired and happy faces below him, and a new title bestowed upon him. Perhaps he could get people to stop addressing him as the Herald now. Perhaps they might even stop referring to him as a magister. “The Inquisition will drive back Corypheus and his minions, and when they are gone, the world will be a better place, for everyone.”

Josephine whooped. Josephine, of all people, bloody _whooped_.

As soon as they were back in the great hall, Dorian handed the sword back to Cassandra. “Here, take this. I don’t suppose there’s some ancient tavern in all of this whose contents I might down?”

“They’re starting one down in the courtyard,” Varric said.

“But before you do that, there are matters which must be discussed,” Cassandra said.

“And when you’re done with that, I’ve got a friend you’re going to want to meet,” Varric added.

Behind him, the doors swung open, admitting several construction workers and the material they needed to set up scaffolding. “Straight to work, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” Leliana said simply. “Straight to work.”


	5. Chapter 5

There really was a lot of work involved in being the Inquisitor. There were letters to write, resources to distribute, dignitaries to entertain...

He threw himself into it. When he emerged, late into the evening, the knowledge of his father’s presence in Skyhold was a dull throbbing behind his eyes, rather than a strangulating heartache.

He went to visit Sera, which remained an oddly soothing activity.

“Family shite’s the worst shite,” she told him sagely, without bothering to either name the problem or dance around it. “You think someone loves you, and then it turns out that they just love the idea of you, and then cookies are ruined.”

“These cookies certainly do taste like they’ve been created with blood magic,” Dorian told her, and grunted a little when she punched him in the arm.

They spoke no more about it, and made a game of throwing the cookies down on some of the people trying to get into and out of the tavern’s side entrance, which cheered him enormously.

“Don’t tell the others,” he whispered to her. “But you’re my favorite.”

Sera blew a raspberry at him, which was exactly as it should be.

He returned to his quarters feeling a little less like there was even more doom hovering over him than usual. 

He slept. He woke. He went back to work.

Cassandra was the first to speak with him about it, the following day. She’d been called in to the War Room- the case of his father’s would-be murders had brought to light the fact that they had no framework for dealing with cases of suspected blood magic, and he’d wanted her input. Sadly, it seemed like the Seekers’ policy for cases of suspected blood magic consisted of a) hunt down and kill the apostate or b) allow the Templars to deal with their Circle’s mages as they saw fit.

“The mages themselves often conducted investigations into accusations of blood magic, only involving the Templars when the verdict had already been reached,” Cassandra said. “That is how it was meant to work, at least.”

This meant that he would have to have an in-depth conversation with both Fiona and Vivienne, ideally not at the same time. Tomorrow, then. That would be the first thing on the agenda tomorrow.

They left together for supper.

“How are you, Dorian?”

“Well enough, considering.”

“So not very well then,” Cassandra said.

She was correct, but Dorian didn’t like having it pointed out. “If this is meandering towards the point that my father is a blood mage and therefore potentially liable to fall prey to whatever consequences we codified as the punishment for blood magic, believe me, I have already taken it.”

There were a hundred reasons why he would not be prosecuting his father no matter what was decided anyway. Tevinter would need to give him up first, which would either strip Dorian directly of his inheritance or force him to strip himself of it. A Magister could hold no foreign office, after all, and he could not, for the sake of the world, give the title of Inquisitor up. Then there was the matter of the particulars. Father had not performed the sacrifices that were prerequisite for the ritual. He had not even completed the spell, though he had begun to cast it. Technically, he was an accessory to the crime, or so one could argue with enough conviction to cast doubt onto the proceedings.

“I am glad to hear it,” Cassandra replied, betraying no emotion whatsoever.

“This isn’t about him, really, so much as his arrival pointed out something we’d overlooked. I’ve seen too many good people lose their lives to false accusations of blood magic back home.” Mae’s father being chief among them. “I’ve lived here too long to believe that it would not come to similar ends down here, just at different hands to different effects.”

“You are… not incorrect,” Cassandra admitted.

They walked on in silence for a moment.

“Do you expect your father will return to Tevinter?” she asked.

“I hope so, eventually.”

There had been four attempts on his father’s life, after his plea that people please _not_ was heard. For the moment, he was safest under lock and key.

“My father died when I was very young,” Cassandra told him. “I barely remember him now.”

“I won’t say that you’re lucky, because you’re not. And even if you were, I feel compelled to point out that I wouldn’t want that luck,” Dorian replied. “Still. Sometimes I don’t wonder if that wouldn’t make things simpler.”

“I understand,” Cassandra said. She placed a hand on his shoulder. “You have my sympathy, and whatever support you require.”

“Thank you.”

Once the ice had broken and he had spoken of his father directly, he found that he rather wished to get it all out of the way at once.

Mother Giselle was the first person he felt he should speak to. He snuck into the chapel during services, his hood pulled low, and sat near the back.

As far as services went, this one wasn’t particularly involved. They sang a hymn, in Trade, one of the Southern Chantry’s ditties that he hadn’t yet heard, much less learned. He kept his head down and moved his lips so that it was less obvious that he wasn’t actually singing along. Then Mother Giselle swept aside and allowed the Chanters to take over.

It was the first stanza of the Canticle of Companionships, the story of Routha and Noemine. The Imperium’s Chant had also canonized this stanza, but it was a very different tale up north. There, it was a story about a magister and her faithful slave, about the trials they faced as they journeyed back to Minrathous from Nordbotten, fleeing the darkspawn. Routha looked after Noemine, even after the magister told her that she could leave, as this was a bit beyond what could be reasonably expected of a person, even a slave. Routha had held firm to her duties however, and when they were in sight of Minrathous and the darkspawn fell upon them, had spontaneously manifested magic in order to fight them off. The pair reached the city alive, and Noemine had her freed and sponsored her magical education, and her children’s bid for magistership. It was a morality tale, intended for slave owners, about rewarding good service. Slaves were not allowed into Chantries, but it had not always been so: he imagined that back when that was a possible thing, they had been told that if they served faithfully, they too could be so rewarded. They too might one day feel the Maker smile upon them, and bless them with his greatest gift, with magic.

Here, in the South, it was a love story.

Routha and Noemine were fleeing darkspawn still, but they were fleeing south, to Amaranthine, and were of equal status to one another. Though instead of being attacked by darkspawn there was, quite suddenly, a slaver who appeared out of the brush as they took their first steps into the city. That he was Tevinter and a maleficar went without saying, though Dorian had to stifle a laugh at the name. ‘Ploni Almoni’ indeed.

Needless to say, neither woman was a mage in the South’s chant: there was no Circle education, and neither woman went on to obtain high office. Rather, they married quite happily to each other, and lived out their days as farmers. As far as he could tell, there were no mages at all anywhere in the South’s chant, save for the evil maleficarum. They’d been scrubbed away and carved out, same as the spirits and the elves.

They’d done that in the Imperium too, of course. There were no elves, and no spirits: the Canticles of Shartan and Silence were as dissonant there are they were here. Rebelling slaves were considered as unnatural and abhorrent by the average magister as magic was to the average southern peasant, so that had gone too. And there were no love stories in the Imperium’s Chant, unless it was love of one’s country, or one’s duty, or of the Maker Himself. Certainly, no self-respecting Father would sing of love between people. What a self-centered, impious notion that was.

He liked to think that somewhere out there, moldering away in some hidden library, or even just as whispers remembered by spirits in the Fade, there was an original Chant which held both good mages and love stories, which sang of both people who loved their country and people who fought to free themselves from its oppressive embrace. Neither Chant as they existed today was, he was certain, the full picture of it. No one had the full picture of it, and anyone who said otherwise was selling something.

Mother Giselle caught his eye as she stepped back up to the pulpit to deliver the sermon. She seemed to falter for a moment, and then she lifted her chin, and looked directly at him.

“Before I begin,” she said. “There is an apology I feel I must offer, to our Herald of Andraste.”

Dorian blinked, and then hastily corrected his posture as all eyes in the Chantry turned towards him.

“I was misled,” she continued. “But that is no excuse for bringing a maleficar to your doorstep. I should have more closely questioned his motives when first came into contact with me, particularly in the face of how vehemently you denied wishing to speak with him.”

“I accept your apology, Mother Giselle,” Dorian replied. “And it must be said that my father is a politician, who has staked his reputation on being a good and honorable man. He-” It was Dorian’s turn to falter. “Perhaps we might continue this discussion once you’ve finished here?”

“After the sermon, then,” Mother Giselle said, inclining her head.

 _The problem is_ , Dorian mused as he let the words of her sermon wash over him, unheard, _that my father has done a great many good and honorable things_.

He wasn’t sure how to handle the man himself, but the deeds themselves stood beyond reproach.

His father had championed safe passage and citizenship for those mages who had come north to seek asylum. He had campaigned to increase protections for Soporati against mages, and for Laetans against Alti. He had stood for increased funding for the education of liberati mages, for increased survivor’s benefits for the families of deceased soldiers, for the killing of slaves to be declared illegal whether there was blood magic involved or not. He’d simply not stood for Dorian in quite some time.

He’d simply deemed the most important part of his legacy to be the physical continuation of his line, not his morals.

“I feel as though I should inform you that his original intentions were for me to bring you out to Redcliffe, alone,” Mother Giselle told him, once the service had ended and they were alone in the Chantry.

“Ah,” Dorian said. “Probably, he was hoping to avoid a public scene. I doubt he particularly wanted to be associated with the dreaded Inquisition even if I did allow him privacy.”

Mother Giselle looked at him rather strangely. “You do not believe he would try again?”

“No, I don’t,” Dorian replied, and then hesitated. Corrected himself. “I don’t believe he would try it again anywhere but our home, and I don’t intend to give him the opportunity to try it.”

“That is probably wise,” Mother Giselle said. “I- I do feel as though I should apologize again. In hindsight, it is clear to see that that your estrangement has deep and well-founded roots.”

“That certainly one way to put it,” Dorian muttered. He and his father had had a contentious relationship for years, and it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that his father had been entirely truthful with what he told Mother Giselle, even if he hadn’t told the entire truth.

“What do you intend to do with him, if I may ask?”

“Do?” Dorian asked.

“Yes. He is in your custody, is he not?”

Dorian opened his mouth, and then closed it again when he realized that she was correct.

He had no intention of charging his father with anything, but he was in the dungeon, and in the dungeon he would likely remain until Dorian made some manner of decision.

“I suppose we must speak of my father,” he said towards the tail end of one of their strategy meetings in the War Room the next day.

“I’m glad to hear you say it,” Josephine replied.

“I take it that means that you’ve prepared some options for me,” Dorian said. “I won’t be killing him, or making him Tranquil, or anything of the kind, but other than that I’d be interested to hear your opinions.”

Josephine began with potential strategies for controlling the Tevinter reaction. Once rumors of his father’s blood magic reached the Imperium, there would be a reaction, and between his father’s position as a marginally progressive magister and the number of his enemies that were likely quiet supporters of the Venatori, the fallout could cost them what little ground they had in Tevinter.

“They will very likely want confirmation of his incarceration before revoking his citizenship so that a trial can be held,” Josephine said.

“I would rather not put my father on trial, thank you,” Dorian told her.

“Then it would be best if you could release him from the dungeon, so that we could truthfully deny having him in our custody,” Josephine said.

“Is it safe for him to be out of our custody? Last I checked, the number of would-be murderers was up to twenty-three.”

“Twenty-four, as of the start of this meeting,” Leliana corrected him.

“ _Vishante kaffas_ ,” Dorian swore.

“The simplest way for you to take care of the problem would be to publicly forgive him,” Leliana continued.

“I don’t know that I can do that,” Dorian said.

“Could you proclaim him divinely forgiven?” she asked.

“Why would he do that?” Cullen demanded. “Halward Pavus is a _blood mage_. It’s monstrous, what he tried to do with it even more so. Why should that be forgiven?”

“Well. He’s still my father,” Dorian said.

“That doesn’t entitle him to your forgiveness.”

“No, but I does mean that I still feel entitled to have some manner of civil relationship with him,” Dorian said wearily. “This would be a lot easier if I could stop caring about him, I recognize that, but that is unlikely to happen at this juncture.”

“Cullen does bring up a point,” Josephine said. “Divine forgiveness does set precedence. Do we really want to be known as the institution that legitimized blood magic?”

“So we can’t have Father in the dungeons when the Imperium’s representative arrives with questions, and I can’t proclaim him divinely forgiven for show,” Dorian said in an attempt to move things along. “What else is there?”

“Well, we can’t let a blood mage roam free!” Cullen protested.

“He didn’t actually perform the bloodletting himself, if that makes a difference,” Dorian said. “He was willing to work with it, of course, but his apprentice arranged the sacrifices and took care of the physical work. He’d taken her on specifically for that reason, I think. She’s a Laetan, one who made her name fighting on Seheron, and she has a particularly nasty reputation even taking that into account.”

“What happened to the apprentice?” Leliana asked.

“She’s the Venatori Cullen’s men have been engaged with trying to track down through the Dales,” Dorian said.

Josephine made a considering noise.

“What?” Dorian asked.

“The Tevinter Imperium’s embassy will have heard tell of a blood magic ritual, and your father’s arrival. The other details we can say were muddled. Say that your father came to warn you that his former apprentice had turned to the Venatori, and offered his aid in tracking her down,” Josephine said.

“We still can’t let a blood mage- or near enough- wander around Skyhold unchecked,” Cullen said, rather desperately.

“And I’m not prepared to risk my father’s safety by leaving him without a guard,” Dorian said. “We can’t just send him away, not until Josephine’s story starts to circulate, at least.”

“So imprison him elsewhere,” Leliana said. “There are empty rooms in our diplomatic wing, yes? We can set him up there with some former Templars to serve as guards and protection, can we not?”

“House arrest?” Dorian said. The irony tickled and stung at the same time. “How appropriate. Yes, let’s do that.”

And then, after all of that, there was the Bull.

“This seat taken, boss?”

“Not at all,” Dorian replied. “I was saving it for you, as a matter of fact.”

The Bull smiled, and sat down, tactfully not pointing out that Dorian had been seated at the tavern table for the better part of an hour, nursing two increasingly flat tankards of ale. Dorian slid the one he hadn’t been sipping over to the Bull, who nodded in thanks.

Then the awkward silence _really_ began.

Dorian let it stretch out for several minutes before his resolve broke and he spoke. “I believe that I have been pathetically clear about what I want.”

“I would say-” the Bull began to protest.

“I have said, which is rather my point,” Dorian interrupted him. “It’s your turn, now, if you feel up to it.”

The Bull nodded again. He finished his tankard of ale. Dorian left his alone, and waited.

“You know what I thought when I started drinking, after I arrived in the South?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question, and he gave Dorian no room to reply before supplying the answer. “I thought that it was okay, because and only because it had a point. It preserved my cover. It helped me develop a tolerance for alcohol, so that couldn’t be used against me. If I enjoyed drinking- the taste, the feeling, any of it- then that was a happy coincidence. It wasn’t a motivation. It wasn’t a matter of wanting something and then reaching for it, not without the justifications I could make to the Qun.”

“And now there is no Qun to justify yourself to.”

It should have been a triumph. So should have leaving Tevinter been for Dorian. Home was such an over-complicated thing.

“I’m not sure how to go about that,” the Bull said. “I am sure that I want to try. With you, in particular. I can’t promise that it’ll work out, but I can say that I- that I want it to. For a lot of reasons.”

“I’ll take that,” Dorian said. “You don’t have to be some kind of Seer, Bull. I don’t need some garuntee of the future. I just- I want-”

The Bull reached out and took Dorian’s hand gently in his own. Dorian stopped talking, so he could better stare at the way his hand was engulfed by the Bull’s.

“You have me,” the Bull promised.

“Let’s take it slow,” Dorian blurted out. “Just- just to be sure.”

“Slow, huh?” The Bull’s thumbed swept lazily along the underside of his wrist. “You want me to cook you dinner, serve it some place romantic, leave you with a kiss at the door?”

“Make him make his rice pudding!” Rocky suggested from the table next to theirs.

“Shut it,” Dalish hissed at him, cuffing him behind the ears.

“Rice pudding?” Dorian asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s his specialty!” Rocky informed him, despite the way Dalish was trying to drown him in his own tankard.

“That sounds acceptible,” Dorian said, and hid his smile in the remainder of his ale.

* * *

 

Dorian hadn’t quite known how he would get along with Hawke when Varric introduced them. He rather got the impression that she might have been in the ‘I refuse to believe that Andraste would send a ‘Vint as a Herald’ camp from the version of _The Tale of the Champion_ that had circulated around Tevinter.

That version, as it happened, was even more wildly inaccurate than the version that had been published legally and circulated here in the South. And neither version would have prepared him for the tired looking woman Varric presented to him as though she were the Empress of Orlais and the Hero of Fereldan rolled into one.

For one thing, he’d neglected to mention that Hawke was some inches taller than Dorian, and at least half again his weight. For another, she’d seemed all too happy to see him- or, well, to see that someone else had been named Inquisitor.

“Really, I am so, _so_ glad to not be you right now,” Hawke told him, shaking his entire arm enthusiastically with both hands. “I can’t tell you how happy I am, I don’t even believe in the Maker. I can’t even fake believing in the Maker. Chantries give me the creeps. I used to think that if I went into a confessional the Chantry sisters wouldn’t let me go until I admitted that my father and sister were apostates, and I never quite got over that fear. Also, the last time someone gave me a title, the city ended up on fire and covered in demons.”

“Erm,” Dorian said, not entirely sure how to respond to all that information. Or to extricate his arm from Hawke’s grip. “It’s not like our demon problem could get much _worse_. And Haven’s already burned to the ground, so…”

That was the moment when Movran the Under had appeared from behind some rocks and lobbed a large goat at the wall below them.

“ _Vishante kaffas_ ,” Dorian groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose with his free hand.

“What’s- what’s just happened, now?” Hawke said, as they watched various Inquisition soldiers attempt to take the Avvar into custody.

“Fuck if I know,” Dorian admitted. “For all I know we’ve just moved into his castle and he was looking forwards to cooking that goat in my bedchambers. Or maybe he’s an agent of Corypheus and now we’re all going to die of some kind of goat plague.”

“Maybe he meant that to be a gift,” Hawke suggested. “Maybe he wants to propose marriage to you.”

As it happened, the goat attack proved to be just the thing to put them on equal conversational footing for the rest of the association. He was quite sorry to see her go after the Siege of Adamant.

“I was wondering if I might have a word,” Dorian asked Hawke the night before she set off for Weisshaupt.

“Only one, Inquisitor?” she asked. “That doesn’t seem like you.”

“Well. Many words, then. I’ve brought some Chasnid Sack Mead, if that entices you a bit more,” he held up the bottle in what he sincerely hoped was an enticing manner.

“Oh, Varric’s been telling tales about my tastes in alcohol then, has he?” Hawke asked. “Alright then, but I get to hold the bottle.”

They ended up seated on the battlements, where Hawke jealously guarded the bottle of mead, and only begrudgingly poured some into Dorian’s goblet when he held it up for a refill.

“So,” Dorian said, once they were both deep into their cups and had exhausted just about every inconsequential topic of discussion. “I wanted to ask you about what you said in the Fade. About the Mage-Templar war being your fault. Do you really believe that to be true?”

“I think I have responsibility for it,” Hawke said after a moment. “I encouraged Anders to fight for mage freedom. I helped him smuggle that bomb into the Chantry. I spared him, and the Circle mages too- which I don’t regret, but people still get upset about, sometimes.”

“I know the feeling well,” Dorian remarked.

Hawke laughed tiredly, and drank.

“Stroud felt like he was responsible for the actions the Grey Wardens took when they were under Erimond’s control,” Dorian continued. “And you both felt like being left behind in the Fade was suitable atonement for those crimes.”

“This isn’t about the mages then, is it?” Hawke asked.

“No. Though I’m sure someone will make it into such. It’s about Tevinter, or rather the fact people aren’t entirely wrong in their thinking of it. I mean, people go on and on about blood magic and slavery like that’s all there is to my country, and that’s wrong and irritating besides, but… there is a lot of blood magic, and a lot of slaves. There’s a lot of misery that my people have caused, and inflicted on not just our own people, but everyone else too.”

“Are you asking me if you think you can atone for Tevinter’s… Tevinterness?” Hawke asked.

“I suppose so?” Dorian asked. “What I really wish to do is change Tevinter so that sacrificing slaves in blood magic rituals is no longer something associated with being Tevinter, but so long as I’m on the outside looking in, that’s unlikely to happen. Atonement, or something like it, might be the best I can do.”

He’s received a letter from the embassy recently. The scribe hadn’t even bothered to forge the ambassador’s signature on it. He was beginning to despair of ever returning home with enough power to effect change.

That didn’t mean he was going to give up. Merely that he was going to focus on doing whatever it was that he could do.

“I don’t think I’m the one you should ask about this,” Hawke told him. “I wasn’t ever really at Tevinter’s mercy. I’ve killed quite a lot of them by now, but that’s not really the same thing.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t,” Dorian said. “So… you think I should speak to someone who has been harmed by Tevinter?”

“Yeah, I mean,” Hawke stopped for a moment. “I was about to suggest that you talk to Fenris, but on second thought, don’t talk to Fenris, that is a Bad Plan.”

“Well, who should I talk to then, if neither you nor Fenris?” he asked.

Hawke made an inconclusive noise. “I don’t know… I heard rumors that Tevinter slavers were in the alienage in Denerim. Maybe talk to them? Or their hahren, at least?”

“They’ve got a Bann,” Dorian remembered suddenly. “There’s a Bann of the Denerim Alienage.”

“That’s right!” Hawke exclaimed, a bit too loudly. “She’s like- the Hero of Fereldan’s sister or something?”

“Or something,” Dorian agreed. “Josephine will know.”

“Well then! Talk to Josephine, and then talk to her,” Hawke encouraged him. “Tell her that you want to get her people back, or whatever it is you’re doing. I mean, you want to get her people back, right?”

“Yes, of course,” Dorian said. “That’s why I’ve asked you. Josephine has been gently steering me towards making some sort of public amend-making gesture practically since I was declared Herald, I just- I don’t want it to be a matter of standing in front of a crowd and saying the right word to get applause, and then doing nothing.” Or, more accurately, letting Josephine’s people spin defeating Corypheus into all the amending he needed to do. He’d always abhorred the Venatori and their ilk. He hadn’t always abhorred slavery. “I want to actually do something meaningful, and let my actions speak for me.” Or, more accurately, let Josephine’s people spread word of it around Thedas.

But he didn’t mind people spouting accolades in his direction if he’d actually done something to merit them. It was the hollow praise that galled.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hawke said. “I get that. That’s… that’s what you should do, I think.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

They sat for a moment in companionable silence.

“Dorian Pavus,” Hawke said.

“Boudicca Hawke?” Dorian replied.

“You’ve put the Wardens under the Inquisition’s supervision, correct?”

“You were there when I did so, I believe.”

“My sister, Bethany. She’s a Warden. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Wardens sent her over here, as a liaison of sorts.”

“Do you want me to pass on a message?” Dorian asked.

“I’ve already left it with Varric,” Hawke told him. “But, Dorian, and this is important: please, give my sister a proper drink.”

Dorian managed to keep a straight face for perhaps two second before dissolving into snickers.

“I mean, _Princess Piss_?” Hawke continued over his laughter. “My mother raised us to be better than that.”

“Did you mother raise you to drink mead with evil magisters atop elvhen ruins?” Dorian asked.

“Eh, you’re not so bad when you remember your shit stinks,” Hawke told him. “And Chasnid Sack Mead is, I’ll have you know, THE BEST DRINK YOU CAN GET IN LOTHERING!”

Hawke tipped the bottle up towards the moons, and then drank. Dorian collapsed into giggles.

A guard poked his head up through the trapdoor, his eyes going wide at the sight of the two of them.

“Erm. Your Worship?” he asked.

“If you leave now, you might be able to forget that you ever saw us acting as mere mortals,” Dorian told him, and bereft of a better idea, the guard left them alone again.

“Oh, damn,” Hawke swore.

“What now?”

“You’ve reminded me that I’m a mere mortal,” Hawke replied. “And I’ve got to leave tomorrow.”

“And I suppose I shall have to inquisit things again tomorrow as well,” Dorian said with a sigh. “I don’t suppose I could persuade you to relinquish the bottle?”

“Nope,” Hawke said, standing upright. “Not even a chance.”

Dorian finished the dregs of mead in his goblet and watched Hawke totter over to the trapdoor. “Hawke?” he called out, after a moment to think over what he wanted to say.

“Yes?” Hawke said, taking a step back from the trapdoor she’s been peering down.

“I knew of Magister Danarius by reputation,” Dorian said. “As far as I’m concerned, Fenris did a great service to the Imperium by killing him, and if anyone from there wanted to track him down, it should be to give him a medal.”

“O…kay?”

“And I’m willing to back that view up. With force. Should anyone try to take him back for other reasons,” Dorian continued. “Tell him that for me, will you?”

Hawke regarded him for a moment, more soberly than she had before.

“I don’t know that he’ll appreciate it,” Hawke said finally. “But I do. Thank you, Inquisitor.”

“You’re welcome, Hawke.”

Hawke turned back to the trapdoor. And then back to him. “Hey, look after Varric for me, will you? He gets into trouble.”

“Don’t we all, Hawke,” Dorian said, saluting her with his empty goblet. “Don’t we all.”

He drafted the letter to Bann Shianni with Josephine’s help the following morning. They received their reply in the form of Bann Shianni herself a fortnight later.

He was not exactly expecting his first meeting with Bann Shianni to go well, per say. He didn’t think that she would welcome him and his aid with open arms, or that they would become fast friends or anything of the sort. He did not expect foregiveness to come easily, or at all. But he had thought that they would at least be able to strike up some kind of civil working relationship. He got along well enough with Sera, after all.

He had not expected her to be so angry. He had not expected her to come armed with an entire litany of sins committed against her people by Tevinter, and to fling it in his face.

It was _his_ people, after all, that had trespassed in her alienage. _His_ people who had dealt treacherously with them, so that they could be more easily stolen. _His_ people who had spread the slander that the alienage was so filthy and disease ridden that their continued presence was a necessity. And when she tried to speak up, tried to point out the perversity of _his_ people’s actions, the wrongness, the _presumption_ , the only answer was more violence. With the practiced deceit of slavers and the counseled evil of Loghain it took little more than a spoken falsehood to discover which of her family would be in highest demand as a slave, and take her uncle away from her.

And when she asked after him, they had had the nerve to scoff at her.

“But that wasn’t _me_ ,” Dorian said, in what was definitely not his proudest moment. “I was barely an adult when that happened, I had no idea what was going on.”

“You came to me,” Bann Shianni reminded him. “You came to me, and said that you felt some responsibility for what happened. I’m telling you why I find that hard to believe, and you’re proving my point.”

Dorian opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again. The litany continued.

He, a _Tevinter_ , had come to her as the head of the Inquisition. She did not trust that either. If there was any part of humanity her people had ever peacefully coincided with, it was the Chantry, and _his_ Inquisition had revolted from it. _His_ Inquisition had indulged in the blasphemy of naming _him_ the Herald of Andraste, and then allied themselves with the rebel mages.

The mage rebellion had gotten its start when a mage who idolized Tevinter- _his_ Tevinter- had blown up a Chantry. Everyone knew that. _His_ Tevinter, a land of iniquity, the originator of innumerable transgression against her people. _His_ home, a place of oppression and wickedness and corruption.

“You’ve forgotten to mention how stiff-necked we are,” Dorian interrupted again. It was an only slightly prouder moment than his original interruption. “So long as we’re listing Tevinter sins, let’s not forget how much we like to look down our noses at the rest of you.”

“Well, yeah, you’re that too,” Bann Shianni agreed. “Every interaction we’ve ever had with someone from Tevinter has involved abomination of one kind or another. My people are in your country because your people tricked them there. I’m not about to allow them to be tricked again.”

“I have no intention of tricking anyone,” Dorian assured her. “It’s exactly as I said. I want to help you recover what you lost, or as much as it as can be recovered at this point.”

“And what do you need from me in order to do that?” Bann Shianni asked.

“Whatever you have so far,” Dorian said. “I’ve been informed that you’ve been agitating in the Bannorn to mount some kind of rescue operation, so I presume you have some idea of where in Tevinter they were taken, and by what routes.”

Bann Shianni said nothing.

“If nothing else, surely you have a list of the people who were taken,” Dorian added.

“Yes,” Bann Shianni confirmed. “But before I hand it over, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with it?”

They did end up with something of a working relationship. Not a particularly civil one, but one that worked, all the same.


	6. Chapter 6

The diplomatic suites were actually rather nice by the standard of recently renovated ages-old ruins. That did not stop his father from looking at though Dorian had demanded some kind of unreasonably arduous sacrifice from him when he moved him there from the dungeons.

“I- I really am sorry about this,” Dorian said. It was taking a great deal of willpower not to throw his father’s words back into his face and tell him _This is all for your own good_. “Believe me, the minute a better alternative presents itself, we’ll be taking it.”

Father nodded.

“You’ll be allowed out for walks, and such,” Dorian said. “But you’ll need an escort, and for your own safety I’d advise you not try doing without it. Quite a lot of people want you dead, still.”

“Yes, you’ve made sure of that, haven’t you?” Father replied.

“That… was not my intent,” Dorian told him.

“Then what was your intent?” Father demanded.

“At the time? I wanted to not be left alone with you, and for you to go back to being where I wasn’t, and I wanted that to be accomplished as quickly as possible,” Dorian snapped _. I also wanted to hurt you, just a fraction of the way you hurt me_ , he admitted, if only to himself. “The way I went about it was shortsighted, and only prolonged your stay here, and for that I apologize. Again, the minute a better alternative presents itself, you’ll be free to seize it and remove yourself from Skyhold with all haste.”

Father opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

“I’ll take my leave of you, then,” Dorian said, and turned to go.

“Will you visit me?” Father asked.

“I- yes,” Dorian decided. “Yes, I will.”

Father Gerontius had been rather fond of his parables, and one he’d told Dorian numerous times was the story of a Magister who had been wronged by a Butcher. On the eve of Funalis, when all are supposed to reflect on their regrets and take steps to rectify them, the Magister waited for the Butcher to come to him and apologize. When the night wore on and the Butcher still had not arrived, the Magister picked up his cloak and staff.

“Where are you going?” asked his Apprentice.

“To visit the Butcher,” the Magister replied.

“You will kill him!” the Apprentice cried, but obediently followed his mentor out of the estate and down the winding roads of Minrathous, until they reached the Butcher’s shop.

Paying no heed to the doors or locks, the Magister strode inside and found the Butcher busy boiling soup bones to create stock. The Butcher did not allow the Magister to speak.

“Begone, Magister,” he said. “I will have nothing to do with you!”

At that moment the soup bones exploded, a shard of which pierced the Butcher’s skull, killing him instantly.

Dorian had never quite known what to make of that one. But he found himself thinking of it often over the next several days, as he visited his father for lunch, and occasionally saw him wandering around Skyhold accompanied by Ser Belinda or one of the other former Templars.

 _I do not want my father killed_ , he had to remind himself sometimes.

Other times, things were a little simpler.

“Once I had a son who trusted me,” Father said. “A trust I betrayed. I only wanted to talk to him. To hear his voice again. To ask him to forgive me.”

“I- once I had a father who told me that blood magic was the basest weapon, an excuse to account for the blood mage’s shortcomings. I believed him,” Dorian replied. “You can imagine how difficult that makes things now.”

The problem was not only that his father had hurt him, but that in the process of hurting him he’d gone against nearly every principle he’d ever taught Dorian to uphold. That he’d ever taught Dorian was worth upholding. And that was a fault that it wasn’t Dorian’s place to forgive, no matter how much his father might wish to think otherwise.

Not to mention, Dorian wasn’t the only one hurt by it. Bringing up the fact that the slaves were probably living in terror now that it had turned out they belonged someone who was willing to use their blood in rituals after all had not gone well. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but the epiphany that his father might be even more stubborn in some areas than he was had not been it.

Things with the Bull were _much_ easier to deal with.

“I’m not complaining,” the Bull said. “But didn’t we agree to take things slow?”

“This is slow,” Dorian argued, already stripping off his shirt. It was nothing the Bull hadn’t seen before, of course, but context was everything, and with luck, that would be enough to distract him. “Look see? We’ve had dinner first and everything. You made me rice pudding, it was very romantic.”

The Bull cupped his cheek and drew him in close, as though to kiss him. Dorian was quite disappointed when he chose to speak instead. “Are you sure this isn’t something you’ll regret in the morning?”

“Very.” He did want… more, from the Bull, but somehow he didn’t think that was mutually exclusive with sex. “You’ll still be here in the morning?” he asked.

“I’ll be here as long as you want me,” the Bull replied.

“Good.” Being first the Herald of Andraste and then the Inquisitor had made anonymous tavern fucks a little difficult to come by. He hadn’t had any company apart from his own hands in _years_ , and considering his usual hand had ancient elven magic attached to it made that much less entertaining than it used to be. And to be perfectly frank, he wanted to suck a dick. “Now, as you’re still forming complete sentences, I can tell that I’m dreadfully out of practice.”

The Bull laughed, the sound intensifying as he watched Dorian get to his knees. “That so?” he asked, his eye going wide as he watched Dorian.

“You’ll have to bear up as I get myself back up to speed,” Dorian told him, and reached for the lacing of his trousers.

* * *

 

He forgot the book about slavery, buried beneath the carnage in Haven. He did _not_ forget the birthright, or why he needed it. It wasn’t merely a matter of proving his identity, and keeping Tevinter from feeling the need to respond to a probable pretender to one of their most prominent Houses. They needed to establish diplomatic relations with Tevinter. They needed a way in, a way to stop this spreading madness once and for all.

He’d always imagined that he would one day sweep into Minrathous and rid it of its corruption. With the Inquisition- as the Inquisitor- he might be able to do just that.

He sent the affidavit back to the Tevinter embassy the very same day he got his birthright back. The response was short, bordering on impolite.

“They’ll want to wait and see,” Dorian said, trying not to seem too disappointed. “Corypheus’ appearance will have rattled most of the Magisterium. The Venatori’s supporters will have known about him, of course, which will give them the advantage. They will have had time to plan for this. They’ll be arguing to keep the fighting down here, because of course there’s no way the fighting could be happened here and at home at the same time.”

“We need an ally in the Magisterium,” Josephine pointed out. She hesitated for a moment, before adding “Your father is considered a leader in the progressive wing of the Magisterium, yes?”

“He is, but _again_ , we should not involve my family in the Inquisition in any way, shape, or form,” Dorian stressed. “A far more likely ally would be Magister Maevaris Tilani. A less esteemed member of the Magisterium than my father is, to be sure, but far more proactive about shaking things up, and far more genuine in her intentions.”

So, they helped Mae, and Josephine did as much as she could to butt against Tevinter’s apathy from the outside.

And Dorian forgot about the book until he picked up another. _The Tale of the Champion_ , the first edition published in Trade, at long last. It was very different than the copy he’d read in Tevinter. He’d expected that, of course, could even anticipate some of the differences, but others…

There had been no mention of slavery in the Tevinter version. Fenris and Orana had been taken out entirely, as had Danarius and Hadriana.

That was interesting, if only because he knew several parties in Tevinter who would have _loved_ to advertize that Danarius was killed by his own slave, but it wasn’t the information that had shocked him. Oh, what happened to Fenris and Orana was horrific, but it was also abnormal, inflicted upon them by people who had a reputation for cruelty. It was an outlier, and easily dismissed as such.

No, it was everything else that gave him pause.

“You can’t seriously have run into that many slavers in Kirkwall,” Dorian said. “I mean you have them falling out of the sky. _Literally_.”

“And it was very annoying, let me tell you!” Hawke called from in front of the group.

“There were a lot of slavers in Kirkwall,” Varric confirmed. “Much less now, but all that desperation and chaos meant it was very easy to make people disappear into your cargo hold.”

“Slavery is illegal in Kirkwall,” Dorian felt compelled to point out.

“So is half the shit I’m famous for!” Hawke yelled.

“And importing slaves is illegal in Tevinter!” Dorian added. “It’s even one of the laws they actually enforce. Five people were executed for it the year I left Tevinter alone!”

Hawke did not call anything out this time, because she was doubled over laughing, clutching at the nearest boulder for support.

“Wow, really? An entire five slavers,” Varric said, sounding amused.

“You know- you know what that sounds like to me?” Hawke said, still giggling a little. There was something sharp in her grin that Dorian hadn’t seen before. “That sounds like a relaxing walk down to Lowtown to visit my Uncle Gamlen.”

Dorian kept further protestations to himself, as they were closing in on the Warden, and he was honestly a bit afraid of what might happen if Fiona and Blackwall suddenly found common ground in hating him.

“There are no hard numbers, of course,” Josephine told him once he was back in Skyhold. “But most conservative estimates place the number of people kidnapped and taken into Tevinter each year in the tens of thousands.”

“Tens of-” Dorian leaned against the table in astonishment. “Where do they all even go?”

“To the mines mostly, and other large and dangerous public works. It’s a cost-cutting measure. They do not officially exist, and so do not have to be provided with adequate food,” Leliana told him. “They’re also popular in blood magic rituals. Particularly the mages, as I understand it. Their blood is more potent, and their bodies can be used to make deals with demons for information.”

“That’s horrific!” Dorian said.

“That’s slavery.”

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work!”

“So you would rather that be done to your own people, then?”

“No!” Dorian protested. “What kind of a question-”

“So you would rather it fell upon Sera, then?”

Dorian stared at Leliana in horror. Leliana looked back, not quite glaring but very resolute.

“Whatever your problem with me is,” Dorian said, as calmly as he could. “You leave Sera out of it.”

“She’s already in it,” Leliana replied. “Has she not told you where she’s from?”

“She can tell me the specifics when she wants to, and I’ll thank you-”

“She was born in alienage in Denerim,” Leliana continued over him. “You will have heard what happened there, of course, even if you dismissed it as a rumor.”

Well, yes. He had done exactly that.

“Her parents were dead before the Blight, or so we believe,” Leliana added. “But she will have had friends and other family members who were living there at the time. She will have had friends and family who were taken to Tevinter. For all we know, you own them.”

“I assure you, I do not.”

“Your family, then.”

“No it’s- for security reasons, everyone on either of the estates has a pedigree as long as mine, if not quite as illustrious. We’re too close to Seheron, you see. The risk of viddathari is too great.”

“That cannot be true of everyone,” Leliana pointed out. “Or even most of everyone.”

“No,” Dorian admitted. “No, it isn’t.”

This wasn’t the first time he’d thought about how someone might fair in the Imperium. However, most of those thoughts had been along the lines of ‘the world would not be ready for Archon de Fer’. He’d never thought of Sera in that context. He managed to imagine it for all of half a second before feeling physically ill, and needing to slam that mental door shut before any Fear demons could attempt to sink their claws in.

“Would now be an awkward time to mention that your father has written?” Josephine interrupted.

“What?” Dorian asked, looking up at her in amazement.

Josephine handed the letter over, and Dorian read it. And then he read it again.

It was addressed to Dorian, of course: he was the Inquisitor. It would be a breach of protocol to address it otherwise. But it was written in such a way that it was obvious that Father expected that the letter would be intercepted and read by others, and not just the usual Magisterium politicking either. It was a letter meant for his advisors, and a masterful one at that.

“What my father knows about me couldn’t fill a thimble,” Dorian said at last.

“Is that how you want to respond?” Josephine asked.

“No, I’d like to tell him to stick his alarm up his wits’ end,” Dorian said with a snort. “Or, here’s a better idea: let’s not respond at all. With luck he’ll think it improper to send another letter when we haven’t replied to his first, and we’ll never hear from him again.”

Both Josephine and Leliana looked at him askance, which was quite the accomplishment when they were shooting each other significant glances.

“Your father is not only a respected member of the Magisterium, but someone whose politics align fairly well with our own,” Josephine began.

“Of course they align well, I’m your Inquisitor and his son,” Dorian snapped. He took a deep breath, and reigned in his temper. “My father has a reputation for being a champion of liberality in the Magisterium, and its one he values highly, above all else. The things he would do to protect that reputation would turn even your stomach, Leliana. We do _not_ want to be associated with him anymore than we are associated by virtue of him sharing a name with me.”

Josephine clearly wished to say more on the matter, but Leliana cut her off. “Then I think we’re done for the day.”

And thank the Maker for it. Dorian desperately needed a drink.

“You look like shite someone’s pissed in,” Sera said as she sat down next to him.

“As colorful and accurate an assessment as always,” Dorian replied, quickly finishing his ale before Sera could steal it from him.

“Everyone looks a bit piss-shit,” Sera observed. “You know what we need? Pranks. Set a few up, knock a few down. What do you say?”

“Who are we knocking down, then?” Dorian asked.

“Your advisors,” Sera replied.

“Oh, count me in then,” Dorian said, as he still felt a little misplaced resentment towards them for the way that particular War Council had ended.

It was fun. _Lots_ of fun. They messed with Cullen’s desk, arranged a surprise for Josephine, and ran around the keep, giggling, as though there weren’t at least two dozen guards watching their every move. It was all rather pleasantly reminiscent of a night out on the town with Felix.

And then they came to Leliana, who Dorian was still a bit angry at.

“No, no- leave it,” Sera said firmly as Dorian indicated the locked box he’d found. “Not interested in her secret things. Not for a bit of fun.”

Dorian opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

 _She will have had friends and family who were taken to Tevinter_ , Leliana had said. _For all we know, you own them._

He didn’t. He couldn’t. But Sera had no way of knowing that, especially in the beginning. And here she was anyway.

“I’ll defer to your judgment here,” he said, stepping away from the box. “As you’re a better person than I am.”

“Come off it,” Sera replied, looking taken aback. “Why are you saying that?”

Dorian was saved from having to come up with a response by Solas.

“Who is up there?”

“Shite,” Sera swore under her breath.

“It’s the Fade,” Dorian replied. “I’m here to tell you to wear something on your head, the glare is weakening the Veil.”

It was truly astonishing, how much disdain Solas could fit into a silence.

“Come on, run!” Sera said, pulling him by the hand, and they dashed out through the rookery.

Later, once they’d toasted to their success, Dorian returned to his quarters to find another copy of the book he’d ignored in Haven on his bed.

He stared at it for a moment. Then he sighed, and picked it up.

“I suppose I might as well get a clearer picture of what I’m up against,” he said aloud for the benefit of any agent of Leliana’s who might be listening, and settled down on the bed to read.


	7. Chapter 7

And then, after all of that, Bann Shianni did make another journey to Skyhold after all.

“Eight,” she said, foregoing all pleasantries as soon as the door to his office was shut. “You’ve managed to locate eight people out of fifteen hundred that were taken, and return exactly zero of them.”

They got into it over the course of the next hour- Dorian’s genuine lack of resources against accusations of not trying hard enough, of prizing his reputation in Tevinter over the safety of her people. It was always like this, more or less.

And then his father showed up. Dorian heard the door open and Josephine’s indignant squawk of “Magister, what-” and then his father was there, in his office, with Bann Shianni.

If he hadn’t had nightmare about such a scenario before, he certainly would now.

“What are you doing?” Dorian hissed, beyond horrified. “This is a private meeting, leave before I have you removed.”

“You’ve missed lunch,” Father said, and at the same time, Bann Shianni asked him. “Is this one of your Tevinter agents?”

“What? No,” Dorian told her, while at the same time Father straightened, and lied. “Yes, I am.”

“No, you’re not,” Dorian snapped. Josephine hovered, just barely visible behind his father, obviously trying to ascertain the best way of defusing the situation.

“Well, who is he then?” Bann Shianni asked.

“My father, who is here on _personal business_ ,” Dorian said, with deliberate emphasis. His father, in a display of willful obtuseness, still did not excuse himself. “Father, this is Bann Shianni of the Denerim Alienage.”

“Magister Pavus, I presume?” Bann Shianni greeted him. She did not stand, but did bob her head in his direction.

“The etiquette in Fereldan includes bowing when being introduced to nobility,” Dorian said pointedly. He half hoped that would cause his father to leave in a huff, or else provide him with an excuse to have him carted away, but to his very great surprise his father bent, slightly but still noticeably.

“You are correct, Bann Shianni,” Father said, only a little begrudging with her title.

Bann Shianni looked to Dorian, who was more than a little gobsmacked by the sight of his father _bowing to an elf_ , and then back to his father.

“You require aid in Tevinter, I take it?” Father asked.

“Yes, he does,” Bann Shianni answered before he could.

“Then allow me to offer mine,” Father said.

Dorian looked at him, and then at Josephine, who was looking less and less distressed and more and more calculating. He sighed. “You might as well come in then.”

Father came in, shutting the door behind him, and sat on the chair next to Bann Shianni.

“What is the problem, exactly?” he asked. “I couldn’t hear very well from the other side of the door.”

“You remember the rumors floating around that elves were stolen out of the Denerim during the Blight and sold as slaves?” Dorian asked him. “Well, as it turns out those aren’t just rumors, and their families are eager to see them home.”

It was kind of inevitable, in hindsight, that it would come to this. Dorian wasn’t sure what he was expecting, really. He let Bann Shianni tell his father what wasn’t working, and his father, who was a Magister just as Mae was, but unlike Mae held a position of esteem, and provided them with some solutions.

They could get those eight people safely home, at least. They might even have more success finding out where the rest of them had gone.

“Could you give us a moment alone, Father?” Dorian asked.

Father glanced suspiciously at him, but he’d been a model of respect and deference the whole meeting, and could hardly break the charade now.

“Of course,” Father said, and left.

“I’m not going like what you’re about to say, am I?” Bann Shianni asked.

“The personal business my Father is here to discuss is the fact that he tried to perform blood magic on me, and now wants my forgiveness,” Dorian told her.

“Yeah. I don’t like what you said,” Bann Shianni sighed. “Is he a danger to my people?”

“I… don’t believe so, no,” Dorian said. “Fair warning, I would also not have marked my father for a maleficar previously, so. I may not have the most objective view of the man.”

“So how are you going to guarantee their safety?” Bann Shianni asked.

“You wish to go through with it, still?” Dorian asked.

“This is the best chance you’ve given me of actually getting my people back,” Bann Shianni replied.

The terrible thing was, she was right.

“If you’re here to threaten me on behalf of the elves, then you should know that your spymaster was in here earlier as has already done it,” Father said when Dorian came to visit him the following day.

“Good. I’m sure you take her threats more seriously than mine,” Dorian replied.

“So this is your price, then? I help these elves, and then-”

“No, it’s not the price,” Dorian corrected him. “It’s a start.”

Father looked at him, eyebrow raised and expression vaguely disappointed.

“I can’t trust someone who used the deaths of five people to bring their heir in line,” Dorian explained. “I can’t forgive that, when it’s something that might be done again. I might- _might_ \- one day be able to trust someone for whom that was an aberration. To forgive them.”

“A long road,” Father observed.

“You lost every inch of moral high ground you ever held with that act,” Dorian reminded him. “So, yes, it will take time and effort to regain it.”

For a moment they simply sat there in silence.

“It’s up to you, of course, if you want to take that road to its conclusion,” Dorian said. “I’d advise you not to renege on this agreement. Those people were stolen out of Warden-Commander Tabris’ home, and Leliana remains quite fond of the woman. She would take it personally if any further harm were to befall them while they were under your aegis.”

“A very long road,” Father said softly.

“The choice was yours,” Dorian reminded him. “It still is.”

He wasn’t there when his father left Skyhold, and perhaps that was for the best. This was not a resolution; as tiring as it had been, there would be many, many more encounters and conversation to have, should his father prove sincere in his efforts. Should his father prove insincere… well. Dorian would cross that bridge when he came to it, and then burn it behind him.

In any event, there was no need to see his father off. Not when they had finally found the location of his father’s former apprentice in the Exalted Plains.

 The journey to the Exalted Plains was a long one. Harding has already set up a forward camp, of course, so there was relatively little to carry. Just weapons, clothing, armor, and a bare minimum of survival supplies. They checked the caches left behind by the scouts, pointing them in the direction of Rifts in need of closure, places to stay, places to restock on any supplies which might be lost to the various perils of travel.

They doubled up on tents. He and the Bull shared one, Varric and Fiona the other. There wasn’t enough energy left after the day’s travels to do much of anything, even if there had been others travelling with them to keep watch at night. And even then, there weren’t nearly as many opportunities to bathe as Dorian would normally require.

Still, he found himself tucking himself into the Bull’s bedroll, alongside him when Varric and Fiona were having their watch nights, and when it was not he did it alone, waiting for the Bull to wake him for his turn.  Still, when he lay there surrounded by the Bull’s smell and his heat and his bulk, he sometimes had the urge to take things further. Move his hands a little lower. Press against him a little tighter. Whisper a little filth in his ear, and turn the tables until he was the one enveloping the Bull.

But he didn’t not when the dangers of the road were so great. A little delayed gratification, enabled by the trust that the Bull would want him no less for the waiting, was just about as much slowness as he could handle.

Perhaps there would be some manner of abandoned mansion or castle or what have you on the Plains that they could appropriate in the name of the Inquisition. A place with privacy enough for the two of them.

Arriving at their forward camp in the Exalted Plains robbed him of any notions of romance he might have harbored. He’d known the Orlesian Civil War was being fought there before he arrived, of course. Refugees from the Dales arrived in Skyhold as recruits all the time, and he’d had a very thorough briefing before embarking on this mission.

“It would be useful to pacify the region, and endear the Inquisition to the soldiers fighting on either side, prior to the peace talks at Halamshiral,” Leliana had said.

Dorian had found the idea of using war for purely political ends distasteful when he was in Tevinter. He found it horrifying now that he had some idea what a war did to a person, to a settlement, to the landscape itself, doubly so once the particulars were around him. He might have even objected, had he not known the consequences of Corypheus’ victory. As it was, he couldn’t afford to be squeamish. The politics themselves were a means to a very necessary end.

They were also, in all honesty, barely present. There were plenty of Rifts, nearly a dozen by their scouts’ count, which needed closing. Fighting had ceased on both sides, as the undead rose in numbers which threatened those they had faced in Crestwood.

Undead were, of course, Dorian’s particular specialty.

They found the ramparts Rosselin had spoken of easily enough. The fighting was more difficult, of course, but when had it ever been easy?

They would manage it, and the Rifts, and whatever it was that the Empress’ troops required of them. They would kill the Venatori encamped in the area too, and whatever else there was to do in the area. Perhaps some flower picking. Maybe they’d frolic with the halla.

“Burning the bodies is the best way to ensure that they don’t come back,” Dorian said, probably unnecessarily.

Maybe, by the time they returned to Skyhold, there would be news from Tevinter. Maybe it would even be good news.

Maybe his father would keep to his word, not because it was the best way to keep influencing Dorian’s life, but because he wanted to prove to Dorian that it was safe to trust his word again. Perhaps, next time they spoke, it would feel safe enough to be honest with him.

It was a future, and not a bad one either.

With the dead back in their pyres and the horrors laid to rest, Dorian went blow the signaling horn to let the soldiers know that if was safe to return.


End file.
